> it's astounding to me that people are so quick to assume there are so
> many incompetents out there, so many lazy asses, so many burdens on
> your fucking world.
Hell yeah.
Long, long time ago, I worked at a production plant as a technician. One of the people I really miss was the Young Veteran (YV) in his 30's, had been there a while and really knew how everything worked, jack of all trades. Fuckup #1, The Engineer -- because while I was there he was promoted from technician to engineer, over YV, much to the sputtering annoyance of all the techs in the department -- was known primarily for overtightening every (don't say fucking, don't say fucking) screw, bolt and nut until sometimes the threads stripped. We had a joke about making sure everything had been "regorilla-ed", and went into a quiet panic whenever he strode into a repair or maintenance situation like some Heinleinian gearhead genius. As engineer he mostly functioned as buyer, and apparently a really shitty one at that, but I don't remember the details. Maybe he was promoted to get him away from actually touching hardware.
Fuckup #2 was the head machinist. In his defense, he might have been going psychotic. A friend of mine got a much-needed settlement from the company for his sexual harassment, so he's got that going for him, too. Early in my tenure there I sent some drawer rails to be drilled for new screw holes, real easy, and they came back hopelessly uselessly bent. I guess he threw them up on a drill press without any support under the work and hung off the lever with all his weight. I knew better than that, and I almost majored in German lit. YV advised me not to send any machining jobs to the machining department.
Fuckup #n+1 was the drafting department. Machining that got outsourced for whatever reason would come back wildly out of spec, like they took the plans and sorta eyeballed it. They'd ignore YV's entreaties not to sign off on it, and YV would wind up doing it himself. The drafting department, and apparently somebody of consequence, seemed to think that knowing AutoCad or whatever gave them machine engineering skills. So the support for a fairly light and not hairly precise piece of equipment was a 2"x6" piece of solid aluminum billet 8 feet long, expensive enough before the 10 MeV protons activated it into nuclear waste. They charge by weight for that.
Did I mention we made radioactive pharmaceuticals?
-- Andy