Mitchie's Memoirs

In 1990 I was working for HP in their Cardiology Business Unit which manufactured heart monitoring equipment and defibrillators in McMinnville, Oregon. I was a “Procurement Specialist” doing a lot of vendor management, contract negotiations, some process engineering, and quality management.

I really liked my job and the people I worked with and many of the suppliers I worked with were top notch in terms of professionalism, quality, and reliable product but occasionally we would have a materials problem.

One of these problems was with the paddle handles of the defibrillator. Our plastics supplier delivered an entire shipment with very bad flash (sharp pieces of plastic) right at the seam in the handle of the paddle. The Material Review Board (MR determined that we should Return To Vendor (RTV) for rework. BTW HP is really in to TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms).

The supplier decided that it would be cheaper to just remake all of the defibrillator paddle handles and authorized us to scrap the defective shipment.

Since we were coming up on Christmas I wanted to do something to let my team know that I really appreciated them. I also have a reputation for being exceedingly cheap. So what to do? Hummm!

With permission from the plant manager I took as many of the of defibrillator paddle handles as would fit in my car. Sanded the flash off, a piece of ½” wide spring steel approximately 12” to 14” and some insulating foam and botta-bing-botta-boom I had a pair of defibrillator paddle handle earmuffs for every member of my team. What a sight to see us all walking around on a cold day with defibrillator paddle handles keeping our ears warm.

That very week an interesting thing happened at the McMinnville movie theater. They were showing the movie “FLATLINERS” which was a movie about defibrillators. That was cool. What wasn’t cool was that they used Physio Control defibrillators in the movie.

Since McMinnville was such a small town and HP the largest employer we took the opportunity to rent the McMinnville movie theater for a private showing of “Flatliners” for the Cardiology Business Unit and everybody that had a pair of defibrillator paddle handle earmuffs was there.

In one scene in the movie one of our competitors defibrillators fails and a huge cheer went up in the audience. Followed by pizza and beer, now there is team bonding!