Reason #42: Meetings, Not Machines

You picture torque curves and heat sinks. You get calendars and portals. Most days in mechanical engineering, the work that moves is the work you schedule, summarize, route, and sign. Slides go out, trackers go green, and the machine is a rumor you visit between standups, (see Reason #9). 

The cadence is administrative by design. You inherit DV/PV plans across three owners, reshuffle a thermal soak because the chamber is booked, then paste a tidy roll-up for a manager who will skim the bullets and ask for a risk line. A supplier flips a flange spec and your day becomes ECO forms, updated GD&T, and a DFMEA revision that must stop blinking before Purchasing can issue parts. Nothing here is fake. It is simply not engineering as you imagined it. The technician fixes the wobble; you narrate why the deviation can ship and collect signatures that prove diligence (see Reason #16).

Tools tell the story better than titles. Teamcenter or Windchill for PLM. SAP dates fighting the MRP. A PPAP packet that wants FAIRs, control plans, and a capability slide nobody reads twice. CAPA closures that live in SharePoint. Jira tickets that are really email with numbers. The plant asks for a deviation before lunch; Compliance asks for a UL note before close. You spend your afternoon re-exporting a PDF because the vendor portal rejects embedded fonts. The “design” lives in the margins: resize a gasket land, bump a fillet, add a keeper washer so the drop test clears.

This is what “cost center” work feels like from the chair (see Reason# 23). You are measured on variance and on-time artifacts, not on authored mechanisms. The tasks that count are custodial: keep the fixture repeating, keep the bill of materials aligned with the ERP, keep the document control clean so Audit has something to file. When the shaker queue slips, you defend schedule on three calls, not with a wrench but with calendar triage. What part of this resembles “engineering” as you pictured it.

You can tell yourself the meeting is where decisions happen. Often the meeting is where decisions are recorded. The real calls were made upstream, yesterday, by people you do not see (see Reason #32). You will keep the paper moving. The paper will keep the product moving. Your title will keep you in the room.