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
Received on Mon Dec 31 2001 - 12:03:26 GMT