In the end, it all worked out because we had the best OCD people working on it.
# In the end, it all worked out because we had the best OCD people working on it.
Dyslexics make the best testers. They will type things that no one else will!
That was clearly a job for OCD people! I think certain people are very well suited to that kind of work-I have a lot of people who I am sure think I am overboard with certain things, but when it comes to data I cannot stand dirty data...everything has to be consistent, and it doesn’t just happen by accident.
Hahahaha...inches of data...back in the Seventies when I was in the USN as a jet mechanic, they put me on a special project with one of the engine manufacturers (Rolls Royce/Detroit Diesel Allison) to implement an engine monitoring system for single engine military planes, something that had not been done up to that point.
We had a Digital PDP-11 brought on board for the project, and I got my first exposure to computers...I downloaded all the data from the tapes on the planes, backed it up, fed it into the computer, and configured all the parameters for temperature, vibration, switch positions, throttle position, all those things, and we generated so much paper plotting those things and printing them out on that line printer that the phrase “reams and reams of data” became an inside joke for us that covered a lot of other non-computer areas!
I sure was lucky-that was a plum job for me. I had been a flight deck troubleshooter before that (one of the guys in white you see just aft of the plane giving the thumbs up before they fire off the catapult) which could be a reasonably high stress job, and this new project was all in the brain, the only time I went up on the flight deck after that was to help do maintenance or to get the cassettes out of the planes and reset all the indicator flags after they landed.