31 Dec
2001
31 Dec
'01
4:03 a.m.
On December 31, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
The only place that I have EVER met any people who
claimed to be
"engineers" who might "have never heard of Amphenol" would be some
university folk who have never set foot into the real world.
Ahh, those "engineers" who don't know which end of a soldering iron
gets hot.
A fond memory from around 1991, while working for a small defense
contractor in NJ, talking with a 2nd-year "summer slave" on loan from
MIT (of all places!). I'd assigned him to write some data reduction
code in FORTRAN for a remote sensing project, and later wound up
having to do it myself:
Me: "This program needs a lot of work."
Weenie: "Hah! Where did *YOU* go to school? See here:"
[weenie scribbles some incomprehensible equation on the whiteboard]
Me: "I didn't. But I damn well know a REAL*4 on this VAX won't
deal with the IEEE-format floating point numbers from the
spectrometer without format conversion, for starters.
Weenie: "WHAT?! [horrified look] You actually want to RUN this program?"
Me: "Of course. Why the hell do you think I asked you to write it?"
Weenie: "Isn't this just an exercise?"
Me: "We are a defense contractor. We build machines to kill
people. Look at the size of my gut...we NEVER exercise
around here."
Weenie: "Does this mean I have to type this program in, like on a computer?"
Me: "No. You're fired."
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL "Less talk. More synthohol." --Lt. Worf