Schlomo the Maniac, part 1
I worked for a guy who ran a small company out of his home that I think was in truth merely a way for him to milk the US government for whatever he could get.

Ostensibly he was doing projects for the Department of Defense, making new weaponry for them to assist in the Middle East. When he hired me he agreed to pay be a healthy hourly rate and told me I could work on his high-end Apple computer that was loaded with AutoCAD and Inventor, and he'd be there for any questions I might have.

My job was to design a platform to carry weaponry on rails at speeds up to 60 mph, but to make it less than 100 lbs in weight total. It was a robotic device, controlled remotely by someone in a room safely out of the way, and it was to carry rubber bullets, 12 gauge shotguns and 40mm grenade launchers along with cameras and sensors.

His initial design had it running along the ground. I pointed out to him that its range would be impaired by being six inches off the ground, and it would be far better to have it six feet or more in the air on rails. He was surprised and delighted at this immediate improvement I had made.

At that point I should have known.

I worked on this for months- not because it was difficult to design, mind you, but because he objected to almost everything I suggested on one basis or another. Finally he agreed to a design, and I got some Item extrusions to build it out of and went to work. Meanwhile, the electrical engineer who had been working on the controls was about four states away from me and had never met me in person.

Then came the day to present it to the military. We were to present it on Thursday, so he brought in the electrical engineer on Monday to assemble it with me.

I'll repeat that. We had three days to assemble an untested system that was going to be presented to the military.

It turns out that this guy, while he may be a decent electrical engineer, had forgotten about a little consideration called inertia. If you switch a motor from "Off" to "Balls To The Wall" while it's sitting on a bench it will behave differently than if it's hooked up with a chain to a drive assembly.

So there, in front of an Air Force major, I watched as the chain slipped and chattered and almost stripped off teeth when the switch was thrown. I commented to the major that we were planning on having the final product start up as a ramp function- that is, gradually on instead of suddenly full power- and he nicely agreed that this was a small detail that was easily fixed.

We put it through its paces and the Air Force guys politely listened, then we went to lunch. After the Air Force guys departed and Schlomo went into a tirade over how badly we had fucked this up and how much money he had blown on this project.

I held my tongue, but perhaps I shouldn't have...
( Wanderer, Thu 10 Jun 2010, 14:12, Reply)