Back when I worked at the big telecom company, we had a Sr VP of Engineering that was a lot like me. Short, mean, short-tempered, dictatorial, and well, no tolerance for BS. I liked him: everyone else was terrified of him.
I was watching Faux News the other day. (Who could imagine I would watch Faux News?) They were down in AZ, talking about the illegal criminal problem. They showed the Marine test range, down by Yuma.
Well...............
We put in a 2 GHz shot, for the range. We took an ITT radio, that was built for the railroad (low) 2 GHz band. We had to tune it for the Common Carrier (high) 2 GHz band. I was out, on medical leave, when the conversion was made. Not sure how the guys in charge did it, but they managed to chop off bits of the interdigital filters and matching networks, to get the damn thing to work. (It had problems, and by the time I figured out what was wrong, we had plans to put a MaComm radio in its place. Which is another story, for another time. It was a POC, of the highest order.)
Anyway, something came across my desk, one day. Something about R&D tax credits. We were supposed to show how much time we had spent on various "R&D projects", so we could get a tax break.
One of the projects......................."Unsuccessful attempt to modify ITT radio at Yuma."
Unsuccessful??? Hell, the damn thing was paying everyone's salary. OK, it had some problems, and I had just figured out what was wrong. (When they changed from low band, to high band, no one figured out some IF components worked on a different sideband. No one read the part of the service manual where it showed you had to reverse the polarity of the phase detector in the AFC module. No wonder it wouldn't stay on frequency!) So, I read through the rest of this thing, and realized it was not only wrong about that, but had lots of typos and grammatical and punctuation errors.
Hmmm.........no way this came from the Sr VP's office. He was a stickler for detail. But, it had his name attached. Not his signature, just name. And no mention of where to send it back to.
OK............I was not afraid of the "White Tornado", as he was called. So, I called him up, and asked what he wanted me to do with it.
He had no idea what I was talking about.
"Well, I had my doubts it came from your office. Too many typos, and get this..............'unsuccessful attempt at modifying ITT radio at Yuma.' I have parts for it, that I am fixing, in my hands."
Anyway, the boss didn't seem to care what I did with it, although I suspect he was intrigued when I suggested he look into who was sending out crap, under his name. Especially when he had no knowledge of it.
Did some digging............found the guy who wrote. Called him up. (He was in DC, with all the bigwigs.)
Started in by reaming him out for the Yuma gaff.
"Unsuccessful? Who told you it was unsuccessful? It is paying your salary, at this very moment. I know, because I am the guy who fixes all the parts. On top of that, there is no way this came out of ___ _______'s office, as he would not send out something with all these typos out. To say nothing of something that stupid. Not only that, but you didn't say where to return it to."
"Well, return it to me, of course."
"But I am down here in Texas. I don't know who you are. You better hope ___ _______ doesn't, because I just got off of the phone with him. And I don't think he was amused by all the screw-ups I pointed out."
The far end went silent. I think there was a "brown note", that was silent.
No idea what ever happened to him, but he deserved it, I am sure.
Jocko
