Well… computer-related…
At the plant I used to work at, I ran a huge robot, which dumped cans onto a belt, sorted them, sent them through a machine which checked the cans with cameras (sending data to a computer inside to tell if the can was a defect or not), the cans came out of that on another belt, were stacked in fives, swept onto another belt by a huge arm, and at the end of that belt, a huge robot “claw” would pick them up 25 or 50 at a time (depending on what I set it at), put the cans into boxes (which were also made by the machine), the box then trundled onto another belt, had hot (HOT!) glue shot onto the flaps, the lids pressed down, then finally, at the end of the line, a jet printer sprayed the code of the cans in ink on a discreet place on the box, and it ended up on one of those steel roller belts outside, where there was a tallyperson waiting - someone who piled the boxes onto a pallet.
Simple, yes? 
Well, actually, it’s not that hard. You had to be aware at all times of what was happening on the machine, and the place you would stand most often was in front of a little computer screen, which literally tells you exactly what is going wrong (if anything at all), where it’s going wrong, and off you go to fix it. A machine like that will not run smoothly all the time, but with some tweaking, you can make it run quite efficiently.
I had to train a lady to use one of these machines once. I don’t know why. She was scared of the beast. Well, I was there to cure her ignorance and fear… lucky, lucky me.
She kept insisting she knew nothing about computers (then why did you put your name in for this job specifically, lady, when you knew it was a huge computer…?) So I did my best. I told her it was very simple, and anything that went wrong would be shown to you on the little screen, all I needed to do was teach her what those things meant, and she would be fine. Right? Oh, no.
She would go and try to set the speed against everything I taught her, causing “crashes” (the thing would pile up, overfill, the cans would get tipped forward and the robot arm would CRASH into a pile of five cans per “finger”… and let me tell you, one of those steel fingers would rip through a stack of five steel cans like a hot knife through butter). I’d show her, this means it’s too fast. Then she’d set it too slow, so it would only put out one case every five minutes or so (when you should be getting something like a dozen per minute on 25s…) She didn’t understand “happy medium”. She would take my instructions as critisism, and push buttons… well, just to spite me, it seems. I was never mean or nasty to her, I’d just say look, when you do A, B happens. That’s the great thing about computers, it’s all very logical and simple. You tell it what to do, and it does it. She would always use the excuse that it was a computer, so it was confusing. I tried using several analogies (pretend the machine is like a car, etc) to make the computer thing seem less threatening, but she kept dwelling on it. I think she wanted to be confused. Or at least she enjoyed being confused.
None of this was even that bad, just a little messy and counterproductive, but that could eventually be remedied, right? Just have patience… the supervisors say she can do it, so just do it.
When you needed to go inside to fix something in “the cage” (which contained the robot arm, it was in a cage because it is dangerous to get too close to it while it is working or not in E-Stop) you must, must, must, it is drilled into our heads from day one, hit that big, giant, RED, Emergency-Stop Button. It is all important. It is Life Or Death. Or at the very least Life Or Limb. There are several E-Stops all over the machine, just in case you forget. There are signs hung all over the machine, in huge font, that say “Don’t forget the E-Stop!”, just in case you forget. Everytime I began training this lady, every single day, I’d begin with “Show me where all the E-Stops on this machine are.” I’d then make her use them and send her into the cage. Big red buttons. Push 'em in, pull 'em out when you’re done and ready to go. Right beside the main controls.
Have I stressed this enough?
Every. single. day. This woman would give me a heart attack. She wouldn’t look at her screen to find out what was wrong if I wasn’t beside her, holding her hand. The machine would stop… she’d look around, confused, then swing the cage door open and stick her hands under that robot arm. Guess what? No E-Stop. I quite literally have saved her life/arm on too many occasions to account for, over a dozen times while I was assigned to do a different job, because the supervisors thought she was “ready to do this alone.” Mind you, I wasn’t the only operator who trained this woman. There were three robots there, and three of us who worked them. We all three attempted training her, and we each told the supervisors she was not ready, and desperately needed more training. They didn’t seem to hear us.
I had far, far too many moments, where I’d be on the other side of a door, look in, only to see this lady looking confused, then swing open that damn cage door. I’d drop everything I was doing, and time would go in slow motion, and I’d hear myself screaming “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”, I’d fly through the air, hand outstretched, aiming for that big red button. Then time would go back to normal, I’d be standing there, breathing heavily, cold sweat, the robot fingers just centimetres from this lady’s hand, and she’d look at me, grin the flakiest grin I’ve ever seen, and say “Oh! Thanks!”
Lady. You have no idea.
We did eventually convince the supervisors that she was a danger to herself and others (she managed to swing the robot arm outside of the cage door on several occasions, and there’s a large dent on the opposite side of the cage where the beast apparently tried to break through “on it’s own” (her words). We just got one of the supervisors to, you know, supervise her, and they saw what was happening and took her off of it).
Ah, well. If anyone ever gets a finger in their can of sardines, it probably just means they put her back on.
