Day 6 at Pentair: Mixing Drinks

After an enjoyable 3-day weekend, it was time to head back to the office today. The day consisted mostly of meetings and learning another step in the engineering process. At 10:00, Mrs. Rai and I headed to the Arctic Ocean for the first meeting of the day. Ironically, this conference room was warmer than the rest of the building. This meeting was a weekly check in with one of Mrs. Rai’s design engineers who works from Texas. She reported to Mrs. Rai what she had been up to for the past week and they discussed future plans. After the meeting, we headed back to the cubicle where Mrs. Rai printed out three long sheets of paper, with drawings and lines and numbers and other confusing things. She told me to try to dissect as much as I could, and after about 5 minutes, I was lost. She then explained that this is the document that engineers send suppliers, the people who will actually make the product. She further explained that most suppliers will require two types of outlines or drawings: machining and casting. The casting is the overall shape of the product, and the measurements don’t have to be too accurate. The supplier uses the casting outline to create a ‘rough draft’ of the product. When they want to fine tune this, they look to the ‘machining’ outline. This is much more specific, with measurements going to the thousands of an inch! After all of the explaining, I think I finally understood everything that was on the originally confusing pages. It was pretty neat to see the drawings and plus I felt really legit holding the large pieces of paper that contained such complex images. After this fun learning experience, it was lunch and then the second meeting of the day. 

This meeting was one of the longer ones I have joined, lasting for around an hour. There were four people on the call, two from Florida and one from Canada. This meeting was to discuss of of Mrs. Rai’s side projects, a tracker pro. I don’t know too much about the product, but judging from the meeting, it was not ready for sale. The meeting seemed to be all over the place, but I think Mrs. Rai did a great job of keeping everyone focused on the subject at hand. After this lengthy meeting, both Mrs. Rai and I were quite tired, so she decided to take a break and show me something interesting in the break room. All of the filtering equipment on the floor was made by Pentair, obviously, which meant that they had some really tricked out faucets. One of the sinks would release carbonated water, and on the side of the sink were different flavors that could be added to this special water. So, I spent the next 20 minutes exploring and mixing and drinking the flavored water. They were all pretty good, but now my stomach kind of hurts, but it was worth it!