Dichotomy...

Emily's been sick teh last several days and I've been fortunate not to catch it. Now that I've said that, I've doomed myself to get violently ill while on vacation in Maine. Oh well. The issue last Friday spilled over into the weekend, but I had some hardware shipped overnight, solved the problem, plus another problem, and then got scolded for my trouble because I didn't follow the proper procedure to deliver assets to a boat. Whatever. I caused someone to have to do a little extra paperwork after the fact in exchange for allowing a boat to leave port with a fully operational system. Even if I caused a schedule slip or we missed a contractual delivery (neither occured), I still saved the Navy untold many thousands of dollars by not having to delay deploying a boat or having to reschedule an acoustic trial, and I saved our company the embarassment of a global Navy message stating that two of our systems were unavailable during an acoustic trial. I think the personal cost to me far outwieghs the consequences of having nto followed process, which in this case would have been akin to not acting at all since following process would have prevented the necessary hardware from arriving in time. I will gladly take the bullet on this one. It's too bad the production manager is too shortsighted to see that I did more good than harm when everyone else can clearly see it. *shrug* In other news, um, other news, um... I dunno, my life has been dominated by work recently, so I'll be glad to get out of town and go do something fun with Emily for a whole week. Lindsay is in town for a couple days, so we hung out at Bobby's last night. She drove a dagger through my heart when she mentioned she was interested in going to UGA, but fortunately, she seems much more interested in UNC, which I can at least abide as another ACC school, and it's certainly less snooty than her other choices of Duke, Princeton, and UVA. I'm secretly dissapointed that there are so few engineers in my family (we're a family of doctors, laywers, and teachers). Jennifer is at least seriously into biology, and her brother Darren is headed to SoCal to work for Northrun Grumman, so I have to appluad that. Figures that the only other engineer would be a fellow Yellow Jacket. ;) I'm running out of cousins though, but I've got my fingers crossed for Nathan; he's about the only one who's shown any real technical prowess or interest. But then, his interests change on a weekly basis, so who knows. I guess I'll have to wait until my friends and relatives (or Emily and I) start having middle and high-school age kids to try to push engineering on them. Maybe I should rethink Hrothgar and Helmet and consider naming my kids Maxwell Fermi and Tesla Faraday? I was also sorely dissapointed to learn that Bobby's (really Wilson's) puppy Molly isn't so named as an abbreviation of Molybdenum.

Posted by Rev. Adam on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 5:46 PM | Permalink