Post #30

Thought for the day:

Time is the wages of life; invest it, don’t spend it.

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Yesterday I was reading a newspaper article about a government project that was less than half finished but was already several million dollars over budget. Now, I know that this is not an uncommon occurrence where government contracts are concerned, but for some reason or other this article drew my attention. Since I once worked for a large company that had a major contract with the U. S. government, I believe I can understand how this sort of thing might happen.
The company I worked for was Douglas Aircraft Company—now called Macdonald Douglas Aerospace, or some such thing—and I hired in as a technical illustrator in their publications department. Our group was located right next to an extensive engineering department, and our two groups worked closely together. The company was in the throes of designing and building a fleet of large cargo planes—the C-124—each capable of carrying at least two greyhound buses plus a full company of soldiers (no, no, silly! The greyhound buses weren’t for the use of the soldiers, but are mentioned just to give the reader of this story a feeling of the relative size of the plane). Working on various design features, the engineer (after this always referred to as “he” because there were very few “she” engineers in the 1950s) made very rough sketches of the parts he was responsible for at any particular time. He then would give these sketches of new ideas—sometimes on a scrap of paper, sometimes on a paper napkin he had been using at lunch when he had his great epiphany. Those ideas might be for a special type of solenoid switch, an aileron control connection, or possibly a cup holder for the cockpit. Well, maybe not that, but you get the idea, I hope.
Using these rough scratchings and a few mathematical notations, we tech illustrators (as we liked to be called) used our tremendous wisdom and artistic abilities to translate this meager data into an illustration that anyone’s mother would be proud to show the ladies at her weekly quilting bee. Actually, while I might make light of our contribution, the things we turned out were really quite good and were indispensable to those template makers, parts formers, and assembly people who were out on the line trying to put it all together.
Now, what in the world, you may ask, does this have to do with waste and overruns on government contracts? Good question. Well, the time allocated to the engineering department, and consequently to the publications department, had to dovetail with testing and manufacturing projects going on in other departments. That often meant that a lot of the engineers would be sitting around doing nothing productive while they waited for the test results of what they had previously done. And, for the most part, when the engineers were killing time the publications department also had quite a bit of down time.

All of this stuff is just a prelude to what I really wanted to tell you, so hang in there.

Those of us who were in a “holding pattern” tried to relieve the monotony by playing word games, or doing ridiculous calculations (mostly by the engineer guys) of how many thicknesses of notebook paper it would take to make the pile reach to the moon. Or maybe trying to prove mathematically that, if you started out with a penny and doubled it (1-2-4-8-16, etc) every day for 30 days, you would end up with more pennies than there are grains of sand in the entire earth. Those are the types of major problems we often were faced with, and though we had no idea whether our calculations were right or wrong, who could challenge them?

Usually it would start out innocently enough with a little note from some engineer asking what the next element was in the sequence F-M-A-M-. It didn’t take long for even us artists to figure out that J was the next letter in line: J for June, of course. It took us a little longer to figure out O-T-T-F-, but once we got it, we got it! (Isn't that the way it always goes?) Give it a try for yourself. Here’s one that gave us a lot of trouble: what familiar word has only one vowel, repeated five times? If anyone cares, I’ll try to remember to answer these questions in a future blog. Hopefully, though, I’ll hear the correct answers from some of you.
I would guess that these types of shenanigans run rampant in every large company—especially those holding fat government contracts—so it’s no wonder to me that there are long delays and huge overruns. And that’s one thing that makes our Thought for today kind of appropriate.
Well, in some future blog maybe we’ll tell you about various workplace practical jokes with which we are, in some small way, familiar—not actually involved, of course—but familiar enough to try to forget some of them.

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