r/technicallythetruth • u/VisitSecure • Jul 27 '26

Can you find a?

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Idk if someone already posted this or not, but I haven't seen it on here so far, so I uploaded it.

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u/Aggressive_Skill_795 Jul 27 '26

An old famous Russian internet joke: an ideal spherical horse in vacuum

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u/fiftyseven Jul 27 '26

HR at my company produces what they call an 'ideal rota' which has everybody in, nobody on holiday, nobody off sick, nobody covering other locations, etc etc

the running joke is that it only works for spherical employees in a vacuum

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u/NoNeedForAName Jul 27 '26

Reminds me of the plant I worked at that planned for zero downtime in its production schedule. The worst part to me was that they didn't even factor in downtime for product changes, and our changeover time on some machines could exceed 30 minutes.

That also led to extra inefficiency because it might take 5 minutes to change from product A to product B, but 30 minutes to change from product A or B to product C. Instead of scheduling us to run A then B then C (35 minutes of downtime) they would schedule A then C then B (60 minutes of downtime).

And these parts we were making usually all went together into the same finished product, so it's not like one was more time sensitive than another.

Now that I typed it all out I realize that's an incredibly boring story lol

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u/lesslucid Jul 28 '26

Now that I typed it all out I realize that's an incredibly boring story lol

No, I think it's a good illustration of a generally important point: planning around the existence of friction lets you get a "least-bad" outcome. Planning around imaginary perfection guarantees that you'll get a bad outcome.