The Lion, the Witch, and the Warranty.

“Precision engineering” seems to be a new TV commercial buzzword (or buzzwords if we’re getting technical). What is precision engineering? Most of the time it is used in the following context: The commercial shows a sports car, usually driving on curvy back roads somewhere in New England (I’m guessing it’s New England because where else is it autumn all the time), and the narrator, who has a deep voice and English accent goes on and on about quality and performance. Then when you think he couldn’t possible come up with another descriptive term, he throws “precision engineering” at you.

Why does this seem to be a new concept all of the sudden? Did we not precisely build cars before? How could we have put a man on the moon and not have been precise.

Wait a minute… I need to go on a tangent for a little while here. Why do we still use “the man on the moon” thing for everything? We did that over 25 years ago, and we still talk about it like it was our greatest achievement ever. Surely this world has come up with something better since then. Okay, so the Thigh Master or Stuffed Crust pizza might not make the cut, but there has to be something that we’ve done since then. Back then a hand held calculator was the size of a horse. Nowadays you not only have a calculator on your wristwatch but room for an alarm clock, altimeter, remote control, Salad Shooter, and a Digi-Pet! With all of these advancements in things to put on a wristwatch, you think we would have come up with something big (or little since that seems to be where technology is headed). Personally I think the fact that they don’t have to use a rectal thermometer at the doctor’s office anymore is as close as we’re going to get!

Now back to the question of precision engineering. Is it new? No, it has been around a long time. Around the time that warranties became popular as a matter of fact. I have had first hand experience with this, and I’m sure you have too. Precision engineering is the ability to design a product that fails on the 91st day of use (assuming that it has a 90 day warranty). So when the deep voiced English guy is talking about precision engineering, what he really means is that when you’re on your way to that big interview, with rain coming down so hard that the high setting of your wind shield wipers doesn’t seem ridiculously fast anymore, and the odometer flips from 30,000 to 30,001 your car will die.

© Pico Twang