Over my thankfully long life I’ve known a number of people who could not accept the idea that they could do anything wrong. If they get a bad grade on a test it’s because the teacher hates them or the test was unfair.
If they are disciplined at work it’s because their boss and co-workers are out to get them.
If they suffer a financial setback it’s never their fault, even though they invested in some skeevy get-rich-quick scheme.
If a romantic relationship breaks up it’s always the other person’s fault.
I suspect you’ve met one or two people like that.
For example, when I was in my early thirties I was transferred from a components test lab at Hughes Aircraft Company to a vibration and shock test lab.
I knew nothing about vibration and shock testing, but we had moved to a new building and the guy that ran the lab, Jack, needed help setting it up. Jack had known me for years and asked if I could help him out.
We started in the an empty sound-proof basement room with an empty control room outside.
We supervised electricians installing the three-phase power we needed, then had two 10,000 Watt audio amplifiers1, two shaker tables2 and a mechanical shock machine moved into the soundproof room and anchored to the floor.
We installed a rack full of vibration and shock control and measurement equipment in the control room.
Between the two of us we ran cables from the amplifiers to the control console, then back to the shaker tables.
Everything was wired through a patch panel so that, if needed, we could swap equipment around just by moving patch cables.
We purposely set up the patch panel so that, in normal operation short 1 ft patch cables would connect, right to left, the first connector to the second, the third connector to the fourth, and so on.
In the process of installing all this equipment I learned a lot about how it worked. I suspect that’s the reason I was given the job.
About the time we got everything up and running we were joined by another vibration and shock technician. Marie had worked in a production vibration lab and was used to having detailed step-by-step instructions handed to her on setting up and running a test.
I kind of liked her when I first met her. but that didn’t last. She was always complaining about how people were trying to mess with her in her outside life. She was also very much into appearances. She made sure everyone knew she wore a Rolex watch and drove a really nice car.3
It got old really quick.
We were an engineering lab. Engineers would have an idea of what they wanted to test and Jack and I would work with the engineer to design and build a test fixture, Jack would program the controller4, and we’d run the test.
They were all one-offs. Jack and I did our best to teach Marie how the system worked, but she insisted on official, approved test instructions.
There were fairly easy tests to do with small tabletop shakers and amplifiers so we’d get them set up and let her monitor them. The tests could run for hours.
We definitely didn’t trust her with the big shakers and amplifiers.
She complained to management that we weren’t letting them to the more interesting work.
After months of this the head of the department (best boss I ever had, named Al) showed up one morning before Marie arrived and told me to pull all the cables from the patch panel.
Both Jack and I had demonstrated to Marie how to set up the patch panel more than once. As I said, the standard setup was ridiculously easy.
Marie showed up a few minutes later and Al handed her a handful of patch cables and asked her to set up the patch panel.
She looked at the cables, then looked at the empty patch panel, then started crying and yelling that there were no instructions. Al grabbed the cables from her, handed them to me and I installed them correctly.
We didn’t talk much after that. She never asked me to bring her up to speed on the equipment.
As it happened, a few weeks later I was transferred back to the component test lab, our little vibration lab was shut down and the equipment was moved to a much larger environmental lab in another building, run by a different division.
Jack and Marie were both laid off. Jack had not been paying his income taxes5 and Marie just wasn’t qualified for that particular job. Jack and I were friends but I lost track of him decades ago.
I’m thinking division management decided our division didn’t need the expense of its own shock and vibration lab when there was another one a short walk away, and shutting it down allowed the company to get rid of two troublesome employees, plus some expensive capital equipment.
I like to think they transferred me out to avoid losing me.
I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’ve always thought that Marie must have had some kind of narcissistic personality disorder. Over the years I’ve met several other people who acted similarly. They were rarely in my life for long.
I didn’t intend to go into quite so much detail, but I told you all that so I could tell you this:
If you believe what our last president says, he has never done anything wrong in his entire life.6
From everything he says and does I suspect he is not completely in his right mind. He’s only about 3.5 years younger than Joe Biden, and President Biden seems to me to be a lot more mentally stable.
Trump is very good at complaining about things, but isn’t long on plans other than…
cutting taxes for the super-rich and large corporations
stopping all efforts to mitigate the causes of climate change
setting up concentration camps to export every undocumented immigrant in the US
militarizing our southern border
inserting the federal government between women and their doctors for reproductive health
inserting the federal government between trans people and their doctors
using the Insurrection Act to arrest and jail people he disagrees with (i.e. me)
repealing the Affordable Care Act with no plan to replace it7
He hasn’t said much about it but I suspect he’ll be following all or most of the plans laid out in Project 2025. The actual project documents are in excess of 1000 pages. Wikipedia has a good summary.
If you believe in a free, small “d” democratic republic, Project 2025 will scare the crap out of you. I plan to write more on it in a future column.
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Now THAT’s a stereo system!
Shaker tables are basically giant speaker drivers with no cones. At high G they get very loud, hence the sound-proof room.
Forgive me for not remembering if it was a Mercedes, a Beemer, a Cadillac, Lincoln or whatever, I didn’t care.
I hadn’t learned THAT much and if you mess up the programming you can destroy equipment.
Long story. It’s worth it’s own column at some point.
Four separate links.
If you know of a GOP plan to replace the ACA please let me know where I can find it.