This was written yesterday on the ride back from the airport. I think I'm venting way too much about work lately, but never fear... "the play entry" will be coming later today (alternately named "my sweet tessa"). Curious yet?

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I just got back from Detroit, and this was definately an "educational" weekend.

The dinner last night and (especially) the lab this morning went great. We got a lot of feedback on the implants and instruments from the two surgeons, probably even better than had it been an actual surgery, because they could really test how the instruments worked without worrying about killing anybody.

Now, I have to explain that even though we are doing this "evaluation period", the project itself is late. If we want to launch in October, we should have been having this evaluation period three months ago, but the engineers were late with the designs. The only way we can actually meet our launch commitment is if all of the feedback from the surgeries and labs is good, and there are NO changes needed to the product.

The chance that ANY system will be completely perfect when you do the evaluation is about slim to none.

So as I feared, but also expected, the surgeons suggested some modifications to some of the instruments. Make this one a little longer... This needs to be angled this way... little stuff like that.

But even though the changes seem minor, it's key that an instrument feels right in a surgeon's hand when he's got a patient on the table. These guys do hundreds of these surgeries a year. If they say it needs to be longer, well then... it NEEDS to be longer.

So, anyway... after the lab I rode with one of the surgeons to the airport, and Mark (the guy who's taking my place in my previous position) rode in the other taxi with the two engineers who had flown in from Bordeaux.

After everybody else caught their flights back to wherever, Mark and I grabbed a bite to eat. After some general discussion on how the morning went, I asked him, "So, what did Francois and Georges say in the taxi? Which changes do they think we can do quickly in order to be relatively on time?"

After a slight shake of his head he replied, "To them it wasn't a matter of when and how the changes could be made. To them it was, 'Well, just because someone suggested it, doesn't mean we have to do it.'"

The HELL???

grrrrr

So these trauma specialists took a weekend out of their busy schedules, conducted a lab on a cadaver for us, and we're just going to ignore what they say because it isn't what we want to hear?

I Just. Don't. Get it.

If that had been one of our American engineers he would've already been racking his brain to figure out how to make the modifications. And I can pretty much guarantee that my notes from the weekend are going to be a HELL of a lot different than the engineers' "notes".

"Eet was perfect. We don't need to change ANYTHING."

Fuckers.

feeling... ok, time to focus on work for awhile...
listening to... bizarre love triangle --new order
someone got here by searching for... long distance relationships miss something?
goodbye my friend - 2005-04-29
out of the loop - 2005-04-09
a quest for clarity - part 1 - 2004-08-30
no plan for a sequel - 2004-08-27
slacker of the month - 2004-08-26