Six Sigma, or nearly there.

One of the most popular places that we go for dinner is McDonalds. McDonalds is a good choice because it typically has the fastest turnaround time between entering the restaurant and getting your food, even when there is a Tirupathi style queue. The other advantage of going to McDonalds is that you can enter any McDonalds in India and order a McVeggie knowing that it is going to taste the same as the McVeggie that you're used to having around your home base. I'm not saying that this is the best possible veg burger around, but I'm saying that anyone knows that they are amazingly consistent in their taste, size, crunchiness, softness, and whatever other parameters you could measure a burger by.

Or so I thought.

Last Wednesday, DJ and I headed out to McDonalds for a quick dinner like any other Wednesday (or any other day for that matter). As usual, I ordered the two veg burgers on the menu and a fries and coke to go with it. Attention was mostly on the football match playing on the television while I chomped through my first burger and fries... I don't know how it is with you guys but eating at the big Mac is a mechanical process for me, I unwrap the burger, open a sachet of chilli sauce, apply it inside the burger and eat it, all the while never taking my eyes off the TV screen.

Perhaps that is why the second burger came as such a rude shock to me.

It was burnt.

Not visibly. I couldn't see the cutlet charred or anything, but I knew that it was burnt at the first bite. DJ smelled the burger and confirmed my opinion.

I went back to the counter and they replaced it for me. Kudos to them for that.

However I went back to wondering what the reject rate for McDonalds is? ISO 9000? Six Sigma? I couldn't find this information anywhere, so I'm guessing that McDonalds hasn't really gone too far to find out, but what I'm really interested in was what was the probability of me getting that burnt McVeggie?

Six Sigma translates to less than 3.4 defects per one million opportunites. In McDonald's case it would come up to approximately 1 defective burger a week, all over India (don't ask me how I came up with that approximation: Its 4 am). I'm not overestimating when I'm saying that I think their actual error rates must be lower than this.

So. 1 defective burger a week. all over India. It comes to me. Its not even funny.

In other news, my website is down again, and this time, its not even my fault, its a bug at my service provider's end... Since he's such a good friend of mine and since there are only two days for it to fix itself, I'll wait those two days before raising hell with him.

In other-other news, the stupid car servicing guys were not able to fix my car's driver side window and the wheel alignment after their third attempt at it. I screamed at them at the top of my voice (which is actually pretty high), and stood on their head for a couple of hours to get the Window fixed. Unfortunately I took them at word when they said that the wheel alignment fixed, it must be fixed. This notion was swiftly disabued later... Now I have to go back and scream at them for some more time to get the wheel alignment fixed.