And Then An Answer….

Caratacus, I hesitate to say it but the message wot's somewhere could be one of ever advancing years. Why these undoubtedly cleaver computer kids can’t figure out a way of informing the users of their products what will happen, when it may happen, what to do to help the process and what not to dick with truly amazes me.

Back in the day, a couple of young engineers, why are they always young? came out to the rig with the usual goofy idea put together with AutoCAD, for us to implement. The majority of goofy ideas where eventually implemented as we had all learned, during our fist couple of trips working in the ‘patch’, that saying such-an’-such idea wouldn’t work and/or couldn’t be done, was not an option. “That’s a goofy idea but we’ll do our damndest to make it work.” That was the only response the OIM expected, whatever his personal thoughts of the idea, and the very infrequent failures were accepted as all involved, hands-on, no scientific calculators involved, had given it their very best shot to try to make it work.

Back to the young bucks visit. We were in the galley discussing the latest goofiness when one of the guys mused aloud, “You know, all these young engineers are so damn smart they could tell you the cubic capacity of that jar of pickles at a glance; but not one of ‘em will have a clue how to get the lid off.”

If he’d heard that somewhere before, or if it was spontaneous
I’ve no idea, but I’ve never forgotten it and have quoted a version of it before. As they say, it works on so many levels.

To round it all off, here's a bit I've also posted before, a goodly while ago, which fits quite well. How sad is that; copy and paste from your own site. However, again, it works so well on so many levels.

1. When you don’t know what you’re doing, do it neatly.
2. Experience is directly proportional to the quantity of equipment destroyed.
3. Past experience is always true, never be misled by present facts.
4. In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.
5. Do NOT believe in miracles, RELY on them.
6. Teamwork is essential. It allows you to blame someone else.
7. Recording of data is also essential. It indicates you have been doing something.
8. No matter what result is anticipated, someone will always fit facts to it.
9. No matter what happens, there will always be someone who believes it happened according to their pet theory.
10. The probability of an event occurring is inversely proportional to its desirability to occur.
11. Half the quantity, which, when added to, subtracted from, divided into, multiplied by the result obtained experimentally that will give the correct result, is known as a constant.
12. Experiments must be reproducible; they should always fail in the same way.
13. If an experiment works, you are probably using the wrong equipment.
14. An experiment may be considered a success if no more than half of the data needs to be discarded to obtain agreement with your pet theory.
15. For neatness, always draw the curves first then plot the data.
16. If an experiment is a complete failure, it should be used as a bad example.

Summary;
When in charge; Ponder
When in trouble; Delegate
When in doubt; Mumble

Quote;  Thomas Baehr.

"Most times your computer is not responding as you expected - first try to find out if the "ERROR" is not sitting right next to the computer."