Has This Happened To You?

As a new Industrial Engineer I was assigned an area in the factory and had to perform time studies. It was a learning experience. One morning I was assigned the job of timing the packing operation for a new product. I mentally chose the operators that I was going to observe and time. I timed the first operator with no problems. The second operator, however, had other ideas. She decided that she had to go to the washroom and not come out until I left. She was in there a while when the foreman came by and asked me where she went. I told him. He told one of the other operators to get her to come out, if she still wanted to be gainfully employed. She came back to work, but wasn’t happy. I stayed with her a little longer than necessary. I was still too new to know how to handle this.