Official Gramps' Memorial Eternal OT Thread

#72,710
#72,710
NorthDallas40 said:
So it’s become clear to me today I can do this contracting gig for as long as I can stand the stupidity.

I was asked to help diagnose a control loop problem on an assembly I am familiar with. Once we got the test bench functioning we had it figured out in about half a day. Easy peasy.

Today I find out they had scrapped five boards, about $5k each I’d guess, because they could not figure out the issue and make them work. I asked if they were specifically all scrapped for the singular issue I’d helped isolate or for various workmanship issues. Nope just for this one issue we figured out in no time!

I’m either going to get rich or go insane. Or both 🤷‍♂️
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Every now and then we do get to watch people running the show self immolate from stupidity ... just not often. In my last real engineering job I worked for a US based subsidiary of a big German company that starts with an "S". The US part was really screwed up because the intent was to buy small US companies doing nuclear work and get into the US nuclear market without building any plants. Not a real bad concept except all the little companies came with little management wanting to become big management, so they were constantly at each other's throats. When my manager died of cancer another politically connected group managed to gobble up my product line, and things went downhill for me and for the product line. I had walked into a mess - four suspended systems for Duke Power on the verge of cancellation (and penalties), and one more suspended system for another utility; they had yet to deliver the first US system.

There were so many meetings and letters with Duke promising to fix issues before I even got there that I finally had to bring all the documentation home spread it across the floor and then write a complete technical spec ... which our software (SW) development contractor disagreed with. The SW was the big issue once we sat down with Duke and hammered out the contractual stuff and agreed that the German schematics had to be completely revised in something that made sense to US engineers. The SW contactor had us by the balls ... the hardware was ready to go but a lot of the SW to make it smart wasn't there - this as about the same time MS went from DOS to Windows and guess about the availability of SW developers around to program stuff sold to work with Windows.

The SW developer and I constantly clashed from even simple menu presentation to the real applications which the guy running the show wouldn't be expected to understand. I for one have always had a problem with the MS top menu always being the same in "File", "Edit", ... instead of something that actually makes sense for the application. Things like FFT and time based analysis simply don't fit into that line of garbage ... "but this is the way MS says it should be done" and "well MS has never built a Loose Part Monitoring System have they?". Anyway I lost the war. The HW was great thanks to the German company that bent over backwards to find new ways to migrate from analog to digital. For the very first time we even had a way to really manage and store pre-alarm data for analysis by having two data streams - delayed and undelayed with the delayed data saved for analysis when the system alarmed. The software was stuck and I couldn't fix that, so it was just outsourced to the problem child and I was told goodbye.

The part you can appreciate happened months later. First I had negotiated several months of pay if my job went away for no fault of my own and I was to continue to receive health insurance for six months. The company decided rather than fight, they would just honor the agreement. So almost to the day that all went away, I got a call wanting to know the password for the tech spec. When our SW guy had decided he was on the other side, he ignored my instructions to secure the server so the contractors only had access to what they needed. I simply started zipping files with passwords. You know it's funny that I forgot that password right about the time I got the first phone call. They had the printed tech spec and the unzipped copy on my computer (if they'd been competent enough to check it out). So I at least knew they had had to swallow their pride, acknowledge that I knew what I was talking about when it came to requirements, and the worst they had to do was regenerate a file from the printed version.

The revenge got even better a few months later when the same set of clowns got a major contract and screwed the work up so badly that they were kicked off site. To top it off they were not paid for any costs accrued and the company then had to pay the cost of having another contractor (I think GE) do the work to the tune of something in the millions of dollars. I never heard the rest of the story, but I'm pretty sure it ended with the company ridding itself of that little bite it had taken. Sometimes (not often) when you get screwed, you still get a little bit of satisfaction. And it's a really sweet taste.
 
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#72,720
#72,720
hog88 said:
We let our son and his wife move in for about 6-7 months while they were building a house. It was ok for a month or two then the questions came up. "Mom, what's for dinner" and "did you do laundry" I knew it was going south right then.

Plus they had their 2 boxers with them that didn't get along with our dogs.
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If you were letting them live with you, you should have turned it around and had them cooking dinner and doing laundry.
 
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