by Mugurel Stejar

Created on: April 29, 2008

His name was Bob. I forget his last name and I am not sure that I ever new it. He used to be working in the defense industry for a long time. By trade he was an engineer. I am not sure if he ever worked at engineering anything, as engineers do, but he had been an administrator for a long time. He never impressed me as an especially gifted person. Apparently he did not impress anyone. There were all kinds of stories told by his past associates about his multiple adventures in embarrassment. I met him in this Wisconsin company which had been doing Defense contract work.

That was a very interesting company. It has been producing flight instruments for planes, civilian and military. In time they developed other product in the field also, but the bread and butter was the flight instruments area. As a matter of fact, the company and some of the workers held a few patents on certain mechanisms in the industry. The company, family owned, was a strong player in the military contracting. I new nothing about the field when I entered the business, and I still don't know too much right now, twenty some years after I left it.

I am not an engineer. I knew enough to appreciate the new generation of flight instruments in which the mechanical parts and clock movements were replaced by small digital display showing the attitude indicator and such. Seeing the little devices was one thing. They were captivating and down right beautiful. Being part in the manufacturing process was a different thing. The company did not only produce for the Military, it was producing instruments for the commercial manufacturers also. And I am not talking about those making small one or two engine planes, I am speaking Boeing, MacDonald Douglas, and others in American and overseas markets.

It was nice working in the company, but very unsettling flying planes... You see, the company was using a lot of immigrants in the manufacturing process. I am not talking about illegals, I am talking about those with a legal status. Most of them, at the stage they joined the company did not have enough language skills to carry a technical conversation. The assembly line persons, most of them were not coming out of engineering backgrounds did no t have any idea about how to handle sensitive electronic parts. The stuffing of the circuit boards was done by using manual methods. The workers were given empty circuit boards with color dots marking certain wholes. It meant that in those wholes they had to use the components

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