Celebrating Failure

26A:
Heres the story of how I failed at my job and it ended up changing the company regulations for the entire state of Florida. Over this past semester, I started a new project with my work. I was installing phone mounts onto the new trucks so that drivers could have hands free navigation and calls. On the new model trucks, the mount frames need to be attached to a plastic wall on the dashboard. I am the only technician for the company in the state of Florida who works inside the trucks like this, and with the new trucks, we were just installing mounts from the old trucks. The old trucks were metal-framed dashboards and the phone mounts had no problem being drilled onto the frames. With the new trucks, however, the phone mounts were too heavy to simply be screwed into the plastic wall in the new trucks. After going throughout the state of Florida installing the phone mounts into the plastic with only screws, they started to fall out when the drivers were on their routes. The drivers were inconvenienced, and I had to engineer a new way for the mounts to be installed. My boss and I decided that I should place a metal bracket on the backside of the plastic wall. After this, I know now that I need to think long term about how my projects will stand, I know when I began that the plastic wall would not be as firm as the metal frame and ended up making another run throughout the state to fix a mistake that could have been prevented had I run some trials before installing all of the new truck in the incorrect manner.