So you have been in the quality world for many years. Admit it, you are the underdog. No matter if the whole company revolves around your statistics and process controls, you are not the operations manager, and neither are you the sales leader. You are the underdog. The rest of the company likes you when they need you, and they spit you when they don’t. You are the hero when a fire breaks out, but they relegate you to the trenches when everything is running good.

Luckily, things have change quite a bit since the early Dilbert days of quality, so let’s have some fun remembering the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of our profession.

Good: When the quality manager promotes a salary increase based on employees passing one of the ASQ certifications.
Bad: When somebody asks the quality manager during a management review how he arrived at the standard deviation of one of the charts, and he doesn’t know what “standard deviation” means.
Ugly: When an auditor learns that the management representative likes to play golf and therefore replaces part of the audit time with a tee time, so he heads out to the links.

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