Sometimes it works!
The Sun, who is our lead engineer on the new robot freezer project came to me this morning.
"I need more space," he said. "The space between freezers you gave the customer isn’t enough. I was told that if we had to space them out more, now is the time before they install any more."
"How much space do you need?" I asked him.
"4521mm," he said.
"We’re fine," I told him.
"NO! I increased the spacing to fit things! Call up your drawing you gave the customer so we can see how much of a difference there is!"
I called up the drawing.
"Remember," I said. "This is the drawing we sent them over a year ago. We didn’t even start the real design until January of this year. So, the number I gave was more than six months before you started your real design."
"That’s why it must be changed!"
The drawing finished opening and he looked at my computer screen.
"4521?!?" he said. "That’s not what I told you last month."
"True," I said. "I gave this number to the customer 15 months ago and as long as your number was less than that, I didn’t change it. So, we’re fine. The number you need now is what I’ve been telling them all along."
"How did you know 4521?" he asked.
"It was the right number, wasn’t it?"
He laughed and looked at the drawing again.
"You have 2200 between them in the other axis," he said. "That’s more than I need."
"For now…" I responded.
"I’ll go back to my office now," he said and went out.
15 months ago I picked 3 meters plus the diameter of the freezers.
I picked 3 meters because it was a nice round number, even though the calculations said we needed a bit less than that.
Sometimes it does work for me.
But, not for lottery numbers.
(Yes, I did make a point of telling my boss how good my prediction was…)