The legend of a Pressure Cooker

It was a great morning. Great 'romantic' weather...Mr. XYZ was in a very happy mood. Why should he not be ! He kept signing along in the shuttle from home to Office (~40 mins of travel)...it is a happy day ! it's a Happy Day ! It's a Happy Happy Day !


The day started of peacefully. Why cannot every day be like today !Then an email arrived - on date dd-mmm-yyyy there is going to be an "external" audit on the project for alignment to AB8888 standards ! What !! Oh No !! This was supposed to be a corporate level certification audit and we were selected ! Come to think of it .......


In the global deployment in m-countries, this country was selected. In this country, out of the n-branches, XYZ's branch was selected ! And finally out of the p-project in XYZ's branch, this project got selected. Come to think of it ... what could be the Odds !! Anyone remembers Probability theory !! Please tell me what are the Odds .....



Thus went up the "Happy Happy Day" in thin air ! The Branch Quality/Audit groups started calling.The phones started ringing ! The cell phones kept ringing continuously lines ! There was no escape !



An army of internal quality auditors arrived to do the mock audit. Mr. XYZ decided he will never again sing the Happy Happy Day song in the early morning !!



The mock Audit was a lightning bolt ! Out of the blue - issue after issue were picked and reported (hey ! we just had an internal audit 2-3 months back). Non Conformance Reports were raised left-right-centre-top-botton et. al. Whoa !



That started the real - work ! There were folks running around, shouting 'Quality Quality Quality...' (almost equivalent to Eureka Eureka that Archimedes has done once..well ;) without clothes they say !!)


Quality records were audited, new reports were raised, and re-audited ! The cycle went on...Many of the folks (team members) volunteered to generate the missing data ! So started the cooking (literally, in other words...data cooking). Poor Mr. XYZ was astounded by the data that was being re-created, retrieved, processed and documented.


Finally the D-Day arrived. Well, what can we lose...Mr. XYZ went for the Audit singing the song "it's a Happy Day ! It's a Happy Happy Day !". The AB8888 audit went through successfully !As the saying goes, All is well when it Ends well ! Phew !!!


But the pick of the experience, was Ms. M......
Ms. M is good at cooking up data..hence was nick-named 'cooker', and Ms. M is VERY good at cooking up data when under pressure... Hence the name 'pressure cooker'. Thus started the legend of the Pressure cooker...

Ahem !