What's Wrong with this Picture?

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

As some of you know, this year's new "Westgard Wear" novelty was not a piece of clothing, nor a Bobblehead, but instead an 8GB USB thumb drive:

But if you look at this picture of two of the thumb drives, is there anything that jumps out at you?

Let me help - take a look at what the thumb drive is supposed to look like:

The correctly painted "thumb drive Jim" next to the model, "Bobblehead Jim"

Yes, that's right, on the thumb drive above at left, the mustache has mysteriously swapped places with his lips. Or he has an all-white mustache and just drank a glass of chocolate milk. On the thumb drive above at right, the mustache is correct but the color under his eyes is darker. Maybe this is "overworked Jim" who needs some more sleep.

Strangely, out of a large production run, these two "defective" samples were the first ones I pulled out. When I noticed them, I immediately went through the rest of the run and couldn't find any other defects. Those are the only ones. Just goes to show you that random error really does occur in the world, even to Westgard.

P.S. Based on this, the production run of thumb drives achieved a DPM rate of 8000 or a Sigma of 4.0 which would be considered "good" but not world class. We will implement some quality improvements in future production runs.

P.P.S. the individuals who received these defective thumb drives were offered replacements that were "correctly painted" but refused. They now believe they have valuable Westgard collectibles. Time will tell.