I once had a mill manager ask me why the lines in converting weren't working? I explained water in the airlines was interfering with valves. He asked me to "show him where the holes were in the airlines, where the water gets inside?" I told him I think it comes from somewhere near the shipping area.
It wasn't worth the words. I told my boss and he agreed. That mill manager made the utilities department bypass the air dryers just 24 hours earlier. The replacement repair parts were too expensive. He shopped his stupid request around until someone said " sure, we can run without dryers".
The whole mill limped up and down for months. The solution was to rent mobile compressors that have dryers self contained for $30K per week. For six months..... The maintenance crew that could fix the dryers for $15K spent those six months keeping diesel fuel in the mobile compressors filled up. The number one priority at every top managers meetings was diesel fuel and not running out.
Wow, what a story. The mill manager must have been promoted from counting beans.
That is so pathetic.
The woefully ignorant comment “How did the water get into the air” reminds me of this story. I worked on an R&D project developing a new type of boiler in the 80s and we “partnered” with the US Department of Energy. I was showing the DOE project manager around one day and opened a viewport on the boiler wall. He looked inside and asked “What are all those tubes in there?” (boiler walls are MADE out of tubes — that IS the boiler). It was the most ignorant question I’d heard in my career. Those who say “there are no stupid questions” just haven’t been around the block enough.