"Sea Stories" and other anecdotes

[Ben]

I would hope that as the BP develops there will be opertunities for us to share "Sea Stories", "War Stories" or whatever. I am starting this thread as repostory of these stories.

To start things off I will share the following.

I used to visit a customer every third Sunday night at midnight to service their mainframes. One of the lead operators was quite prolific (she called herself "Fertile Mertle"). After a couple of years of working with her we were taking a break and I said to her "Well, I see that you are once again with child." To which she replied "No, just fat!"

I learned that night!

BTW: It turned out that she was indeed with child, but had not told anyone else yet and could not resist the opertunity to "stomp on" me after I had unwittingly opened myself up.

Moral of the Story: Never ask someone if the are pregnant. When the time is right they will tell you.

Ben

[Ben]

Years ago I was the Disk Support Specialist for the Allegheny District of Digital Equipment Corporation. Disk technology was still pretty primitive back then. I was lamenting to the District manager about how I was spending all of time dealing with issues of new technology that was unproven. The DM, Ernie Dale, said to me;

"Ben, when you are running in the dark, it is the lead sled dog that runs into the tree."

Ben

[Ray.R]

A team of Biomed Engineers spent many months developing a new product.
After long-term studies, it was discovered that a toxic "oil" permeated through a polymer membrane and could cause harm to the patient. A very long meeting was held to present the findings as well as recommendations on how to proceed further with the project.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the Engineering Director told his engineering staff the following:

"You guys are paid to do, not to think!!! I want you to DO not to THINK. Do as I say, not as I think!!!"

We did not dare to laugh in front of him..

Lesson Learned: "Engineers were born to create, thus think. If you are not allowed to use you creativity, be creative enough to find a place that will!!"

[Ben]

See reply #9 in this thread.

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=146961#M146961

 where Dennis tells his HP VEE story.

Ben

[Ben]

One of the users on the forum reminded me of another "Sea Story".

Years ago while working at DEC I had the oppertunity to help out Mister Rogers and his group with an issue they had with printing some reports. Yes that is the real Mister Rogers from public TV fame. This was a rather unique experience for me because they weher not your average group of computer users. I was given the tour of thier offices and was mystified by the attitude of everyone because they ALL acted just like Mister Rogers!

So after determining I was not going to be able to get them fixed up before the end o the day I delivered the bad news and was bracing for the normal "WHAT DO YOU MEAN...." reaction but instead was suprised when my contact responded;

"That's OK Ben. Want a cookie?"

The real charater in that group was Mr McFeeley who in fact was the writtern of all of those shows (Prior to learning that fact I was convinced that Fred just stepped in front of the camera and sstarted winging it.) His office walls were completely covered with pidgeon holes that held every script of every show they ever did. So before returning to visit them again, one of the office secrataries i worked with asked me to get her some autographs. The Mr Roger's gang was more than happy to comply and even through some T-shirts but the autographed picture from Mr McFeely that read;

"Stop down some time and find out how I got my name."

(where is that bug-eyed emoticon when you need one?)

Ben 

Message Edited by Ben on 04-15-2009 09:55 AM

[Andrey_Dmitriev]

Somewhere in the irish sea:

 

Click on the image, save the file, unzip and enjoy!

Andrey.

[MattBradley]

This was pre-LabVIEW, but very amusing.

A company developed a new "torpedo" (well it wasn't quite a torpedo, but that's being technical).  It ran off very high temperature and pressure nitrogen.  The problem with getting it to work was the sealing.  Finally, they found an o-ring that could handle the temperature and pressure.

So they put it in and brought it to us to test.  It was a very short test because it did not work.  Eventually, we found out why.

The high temperature, high pressure o-ring was also water soluble.  When they took it apart, it was all goo.

(Torpedos are used underwater, for those of you who didn't know.)

[Ben]

Durring a weekly meeting we where reviewing the contents of a new report (POVIS) and someone asked about if the account balances can be rounded of to the nearest whole dollar. My boss replied;

"On the POVIS, I don't plan on showing any sense (cents) at all!"

Ben

[LV_Pro]

The "Somewhere in the Irish Sea" commercial is based on an apocryphal story that has circulated in the naval community for several years, mentioned in snopes.com "Lighthouse and Aircraft Carrier" with the supposed dialog almost verbatim. Pretty funny ad though, benn using Silva compasses for a long time myself.

[MattBradley]

Here's why I became a consultant.

Years ago, I was working for an institution where most of the management should have been institutionalized.  Honesty was not allowed under any circumstances.  Anyway, I figured out that there was a slight nonlinear relationship with sensors that they had been using and that they were automatically setting the zeroth order coefficient to 0.0.  By using a fourth-order polynomial fit, I was able to dramatically reduce the error and allow them to do tests in regions that they could never approach before (by an order of magnitude).  Did they like that?  NOOOO!

One guy told me that the extra coefficients took up too much hard drive space (this was in the early 90's, a 1 G HD cost about $1000).  Right.  He also told me that the calculations would slow down the testing.  Since I had also reconfigured the test so it took 30 minutes instead of 4 hours, I had a hard time seeing his ridiculous point.  (And if you did figure it out, it would add less than a second to the entire test).

Then another guy told me that it was a spring, and springs obeyed Hooke's law, so it had to be linear.  He said if I put that on a Physics test he would give me a zero.  I pointed out to him that I majored in physics, pulled out a 300 level mechanics book, and pointed to the spot where it stated that Hooke's law was an approximation of a Taylor Series and therefore, an infinite polynomial.

Finally, they hired a consultant at $10K per day to come in and tell me I was wrong.  Two weeks after he came in, I still hadn't heard anything.  Seems he said I was right, I finally found out.  I knew I had a future in consulting.