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...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing Shakespeare, Macbeth 5,5,17 |
Dominic Vautier
6/2012
I was picked up by a scientific group that did what I called backass programming, a type of heuristics, which means that there are alternate ways to solve a problem, and states that the quickest solution or the shortest one may not necessarily be the best one. Usually a computer program solves problems but this group developed interactive programs that asked questions, very much like robotic psychiatrists.
Me:
I’m
having a difficult time right now.
Robot: Tell me about your difficult time?
Me: I think my wife doesn’t
love me anymore
Robot: Why do you think your wife doesn’t love you anymore?
So it worked like this:
Engineer: I
need to design a stringer
Robot: What kind of a stringer?
Engineer: For effectivity E0317
waterline 6 buttock 10 and it needs to be metal reinforced.
Robot: What kind of metal?
Engineer: Titanium alloy.
Robot: What kind of titanium alloy?
I designed and programmed several difficult but
interesting systems. I also
replaced a couple of really bad programs dealing with combustibility and
flammability considerations when using certain materials on an airplane.
The users really liked me, but the boss didn’t like me and I got
surplussed. When you get surplussed You get 90 days to find another job or you get
a layoff notice. It was 1995 and
not a good time to get laid off.
I was lucky to pick up a job in flatbed plotting. The programming was useful but not particularly challenging. Nevertheless I did do some pretty good stuff and everybody liked me. We had a Mexican boss so we got to go out a lot to Mexican places for lunch.
One day the boss came in and said “You have to go to Everett”. I said “ Er, what are my options?” He replied “You have two choices.”
Believe it, I had a great time in
Everett. My childhood was there but I used to think that
Everett
was where I would go to die, like salmon do.
I had to replace a system that had no source code. It got lost. No source code is not good at all. There is absolutely no way to fix anything if it breaks. So I had to reverse engineer it, which was not difficult to do. The system tracked "travelers", or out of sequence parts. It was quite critical to production. Everett did many things different from the rest of the company.
I spent a year in Everett. Boeing came out of it's slump quickly and begun to open up new jobs all over the place. I could tell this by how full the parking lot was, and how long it took to find a place to park, and how far I had to walk after finding a place to park. This was a good indicator of the company's health.
It was a 26 mile drive to Everett and as I was coming home one day I suddenly realized that at the moment of birth God gives each baby just so many hours to commute and then you die. So I got a job in Renton.