Michigan

I was working a particular program to build something and we needed a device called a "ball screw". You'll find one in any trunk or other backdoor lid that opens and closes with the push of a button. It's about the size of a Tootsie. Inside is a good dozen little ball bearings smaller than a BB. They were showing us an example of one and I noticed that it had way fewer balls than it could hold, and maybe would be beneficial to function. I asked if it was just a feature of the sample, and not of a production version. The answer was sheepishly delivered that no, their customer (a well known luxury vehicle manufacturer) had asked them to determine the absolute minimum number of balls that could be included to "keep the costs down". I had to express that we had no such concerns because we'd only being ordering on the scale of about a thousand and didn't want to worry about the 5 cent savings this would achieve. We'd rather have all the balls in hopes that a failure would never occur.