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54 The PCB Design Magazine • October 2014 But there was only one problem with mov- ing the shelves: A fire extinguisher hung exact- ly where we wanted to move them. Now, that brought everything to a stop. First, there was a big discussion about where fire extinguishers were supposed to go, how they were supposed to be hung, how high they were supposed to be hung, and how near the door frame they were supposed to be. They sent someone out to find an OSHA rule booklet and then they started looking at that. It was such a waste of time. I wanted to kill some- body—either myself or maybe the facilitator. These people were discussing this with all of the seriousness in the world. They were acting like this was one hell of a real problem and that we should spend the right amount of time and do this right. After about 20 minutes on this subject, the Lean lady sent someone back to get her big pad of paper from the easel in the conference room and bring it into the quality department. That's when she started talking about this "decision fish" thing again. She asked for suggestions and then wrote everything down on the fish scales. One side had the pros and the other the cons. Man, it was horrible. After 45 minutes of this, I had had enough. I grabbed the fire extinguisher, brought it over to where it should be, held it up, marked the spot with my pen, and told them that this was where they needed to put it. Then I walked out of the room. I was done. I thought, if you ask me to go in there again, I'm going home. I've lost enough brain cells for one day. I am done. I have retired from this Lean bullshit for the rest of my life. Inventing the Super Board Bob Tarzwell: One of my best inventions took four years. During a routine thermal reli- ability study, one panel stood out as virtually indestructible over 3,000 thermal cycles, com- pared to the other four, which all showed nor- mal 200–400 cycles-to-failure. For some reason, this one panel, which for all known reasons should be the same as the other four panels, passed the toughest thermal stress tests with fly- ing colors when its accompanying three panels were normal. I studied the panels, cross-sectioned them, looked, pondered and kept it secret. I carried those panels with me for years. I kept experi- bob and me TARzWELL'S FIRST—AND LAST—LEAN MEETING continues Figure 1: an example of an Ishikawa fish diagram designed to help break down the causes of problems. In this case, it may have caused Tarzwell to have a breakdown.