Reason #32: You Live in the Gap

Your first week explains the org chart without saying it. The technician knows the machine because he built it. The manager knows the roadmap because he sold it. You stand between them with a clipboard and a CAD window, translating one into the other. You are not allowed to touch the fix, and you are not invited to set the strategy. You own the space in the middle, the gap no one else wants, see Reason #14.

The gap has a schedule. A PPAP slips two days, the thermal soak runs long, the vibration rig is booked by another program. You rewrite the plan of record and herd signatures through an ECO gate that times out whenever Procurement sneezes. The hands that cut metal are busy, the minds that cut budgets are elsewhere, and you explain to both why a RoHS certificate is still missing, see Reason #9.

Your authority is borrowed and conditional. On Monday you mediate a GD&T conflict between a casting vendor and an in-house fixture that crept out of square. On Tuesday you chase a packaging drop test failure that cracked the corner you asked to radius last month. On Wednesday you discover the ERP thinks a superseded part number still lives in the BOM, so the line stops while everyone wonders who owns the spreadsheet. It is always you, until the moment a decision matters, when it is never you.

The gap is where credit evaporates. A technician improvises a shim that keeps a thermal interface alive through DV. The manager slides the green checkmark into a deck and calls it “teamwork.” You collect the redlines and promise to update the drawing before PV. When the CE mark review finds a labeling quirk you could not have known about, the fix is “urgent” and the pre-read is already on someone else’s calendar.

Even your calendar belongs to the gap. You commute because the product is here, not because your judgment matters more in person, see Reason #20. You sit near the test bays so you can be fetched. You write up the failure report in language Legal can live with, then watch the corrective action land above your pay grade. The only thing that is truly yours is the inbox.

People say mechanical engineering is flexible. It is. You bend.