Not 100% sure this goes here, but let's give it a go. (Obligatory on mobile)
I work in the printing industry (Labels mostly like what's on most grocery store items) running HP presses or Digicon converters. These actually create the labels. About 4 months into my employment at this company, I start noticing an issue where the gaps between each label are either half as small, or twice as big. This causes issues customer side where the sensors detecting label gaps get thrown off and affect customer production.
When I noticed this I assumed the issue was on my partner presses side. I show him the issue, he pulls out a notebook full of customer complaints lobbied at him. 50 total complaints, 15 write ups over the course of 6 years. The company couldn't afford to lose him as he was a veteran 20000 HP operator and those can be difficult to find. He explains to me the issue, that he's been trying to fix it but HP sold them a 'lemon' and sometimes the scaling (affects label size/what we thought the issue was) changes mid run. He fixes it for the next job, life goes on.
The next day, I run the first job HP ran on the new scaling setting and its STILL bad. I confront him more confrontational than I should've, but we're both adults so we calm down and figure out WTF happened. We go to our certified* table that has all sorts of measurements laser etched into it. These things cost thousands of dollars due to their accuracy. We measure the labels he saved in a retain from the run, and its 100% perfect, and I've had some experience on the machine so I understand how to properly check scaling and everything checks out. So why is the gap so bad? I deduce it must be from my machine and begin troubleshooting.
I figure out what the issue is! The pneumatic pressure on our semi-rotary dancers are 4x higher than it should've been. The dancer makes sure the labels are in the correct place on the machine to be cut in the right shape, they move back and forth to achieve this, hence the name Dancer. That's why we thought it was the scaling on HP, too big/small and you get gaps because the dancer can't 'figure out' where to put the labels. Scaling is a fairly common problem, which is why we assumed thats what it was. My issue wasn't. I'd never even heard of someone fucking this setting up. It comes preset from the manufacturer and is in the back of the machine away from anything any operator should reasonably need access to. The pressure being so high was causing my material to literally stretch when it's 'dancing', hence the wrong sizes.
I take an impressive amount of notes/proof to Quality Assurance. I'm talking 45m of video showing a correlation of changing this setting to improvement of gap size (i won't explain what i used to prove, industry jargon, just trust me). Cut out samples of every single change i made as I was experimenting with what the right pressure is, totalling about 35 samples. Measurement comparisons of before and after including HP retains. I couldve won a court case with how much proof I had. I left that morning (I work overnight, somewhat relevant) thinking I had just earned my place as a hard worker, good thinker, and company focused employee.
When I showed up the next day, the first thing I get is written up. For “changing machine settings” when I'm not allowed to (not a rule, how could I be expected to prepare for different jobs if I cant change settings?). To his credit, my supervisor was pissed off, he thought I should've gotten a raise and told me he went to bat for me against his boss, because they wanted me suspended.
Now, How did I get labeled the dumbass? When I informed my coworkers of what I discovered, they took huge offense. Both of the day shift digicon operators refused to work all day because I “dont know what I'm doing and I ain't running that machine until its fixed”. The 1st shift supervisor is forced to recheck every single thing i did that morning by hand. This takes all day. He checks all 84 of my rolls and not a single one has any issue.
When he takes this up with the operators, they come up with some lame ass excuse that they had just changed out the nip rollers (help control pressure/tension) and thats what solved the problem, not my fix. He takes them at their word and informs my super that I am to be written up. 1) they changed the nips that morning, after my troubleshooting. 2) the nips were only 6 months old, certainly not the cause of a 6 year old issue. To prove this, i immediately check if its still cutting right. It's not, they put the pressure back. I turn the pressure to what I had it at before and the labels are right again. I take my evidence to my super. I get written up a 2nd time for insubordination: wilfully ignoring a direct order. I'm not allowed to change settings anymore, remember?
This was the last time I even vaguely cared about putting in effort there. The customer this affected was their biggest, roughly 6 million a year. They'd lost almost $200k in reruns over 6 years, they can eat it due to the contract size but still. I ended up leaving 2 months later due to hating everything about this place.
That being said, of the 5 companies I've worked for in this industry, this is actually the second best.