Quality control supervisor tells fruit-robot-checker to stop reporting issues that she sees and to just do her job: 'Your job is only to count. Count, count, count, and count. That’s it'

Normally, it would be prudent to keep your eyes open for any issues you might see outside of your immediate role. The common-sense rationalization of this is that it's often better to address problems early on before they become bigger ones that are more costly and serious to manage.

You might expect the reaction for doing so to be praise and recognition, but surprisingly, this couldn't be further from the truth. Unfortunately, some people just don't like to hear about when something is wrong; they'd much rather just carry on down the highway to disaster rather than lift a finger and take an exit.

For instance (and this will happen many times in your career), if you're expressing problems with a plan or changes to a process that your boss has shared with you, they'll usually just wind up branding you as "negative," "old school," or "resistant to change." Of course, when exactly what you were warning about transpires, they'll pull out the proverbial brush and shovel and sweep everything under the rug, pretending nothing happened at all before repeating the process.

Meanwhile, if you're reporting a workplace hazard, chances are there's some manager immediately above you or some bean counter further up the chain who won't appreciate having a risk outlined in writing. They might have even already been aware that it existed, but now that someone has pointed it out, they have to do something about it before it becomes a liability.

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"You're only here to count."

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When your job is simply to check the work of robots—something I think a lot of us will be doing in the near future—it kind of is your responsibility to point out things that are going wrong with the robot's work. In this case, the robots were clearly playing Fruit Ninja in their spare time, and it was rubbing off on their work. When this worker tried to report the issues she was seeing to quality control, she ended up dealing with someone who was disgruntled that she was making more work for them.
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_{The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.}
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_{The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.}