Technologists
Just who are they?Technologists have inherited rare talents which uniquely qualify them to function in a realm untouchable by those who do not have the capabilities of the technologist. This makes them extremely vulnerable to those who actually have power, money and political clout, because technologists are different from at least 75% of the rest of the population which leaves them utterly hopelessly defenseless against oppressive discrimination. People have come to expect that the technologist will be kind and understanding to help them get their car started, their pc working, the network back up, their TV remote to get the #%@$#!! cable box working right, to fix the plumbing, to repair their stove and washing machine, to keep the lights burning, with good grace and friendly charm--and it wasn't their fault that the blasted thing got broken, because technology is inherently unreliable and should be durable enough to take a few hits and whacks. And they cannot understand why the bill is so high.
The DifferencesBig corporations have them, of course, because they are absolutely necessary to the functioning of all the equipment, like copiers, and telephone lines to the faxes and the telephone lines, but like the plumbers who are invited to the Country Club, they must come in through the back service entrance and not through the front door, because they are there to fix the plumbing; they are definitely not members of the club--they will be asked to leave as soon as they are done, and they should not expect to remain to gawk at whatever technotoys strewn about which might be of interest to them. Given any kind of choice in the matter, those who are the consumers of their service would, can and do, eliminate them as quickly as they think they can do without them: And in big corporations they are downsized, eliminated and outsourced [make that ousted-sourced] when and where it is possible. Because, the business of big business is to exchange dirty little pieces of paper [herein after known as filthy lucre], or more accurately, soiled electronic bits around vast financial networks, in the hopes that they will collect more abstracted wealth than they disburse. The good business people, who have control and domination over the technologists and basically have them at their mercy, don't see the world the way the technologist does: The business person has what is known as "abstract visualization", which means that these people understand a two dimensional world. All good technologists have "structural visualization", which means they have inherited a brain structure from their mothers which permits them to "see" three dimensional objects in their brains, revolve them, rotate them, make various transformations on objects, all inside their heads; technologists live in a world of 3-d objects and understand how things work internally; people with "abstract visualization" only perceive the world in two dimensions and have the belief that how things look is more important than how things work. Technologists differ from those who do not have structural visualization in the processes they use: People with abstract visualization use processes oriented to linear lists in a one, two, three, etc order--they see triangles; Technologists can see the processes one, two, three, etc, with each numbered process capable of having an infinite number of processes behind it, as in 1.1, 1.111, 1.2, 2, 2.1, 2.3, 2.13--the trick being that the set represented by one is pictured by them as being behind the number one, whereas the person with abstract visualization only sees one, two, three, and that's it; technologists see pyramids while the rest see triangles--it's the difference between perceiving only two dimensions versus perceiving three or more dimensions. People with abstract visualization understand best such abstract things as [but not restricted to]:
Technologists--folks with structural visualization--understand best:
This, of course, is not a comprehensive list, but a sufficient sample to give you the idea of what's going on here. This is not to say that technologists don't have an interest in the first list--they very much have a vested interest in such things as investment, insurance, writing, history, sociology, entertainment, etc--because they really do: The point is that they view these things differently than the non-technologist. For example, when a technologist goes shopping for a new car with his non-structural wife [and the poor children are likely to be victims here, because their parents don't understand each other, and they can't understand their dad], they see things much differently. She sees color, she sees leather interior, she sees dollar signs. He sees horsepower, he sees cool technology and gadgets, he sees the sophistication of the technology of the engine, breaking system, stereo, exhaust, tires, transmission--in short, all of what goes on behind the machine--and furthermore, he sees it all in an instant, because his brain is processing this stuff at a rate his wife could never hope to achieve [on the other hand, get him in a conversation in the kitchen before Thanksgiving Dinner with all the women talking at once using the neural connections in their brains across the awesome collossum, and watch him turn into a hopeless dolt and slink away!]. She sees a way to get from place to place in style; he sees a new technotoy. Could this possibly lead to conflict? I'll let you decide. It wasn't always this wayThroughout history across millennia, technologists have gotten their fix in different ways than they do now for rather prosaic pragmatic reasons, namely there wasn't all that much technology to be had. But let's be fair here. To be an effective farmer, it is very helpful to have structural visualization. Farmers have a slice of life unavailable to city folk--let's say those city folk subject to Hammurabi in Babylon--they need to be able to picture what's going on inside the cow during birthing season, understand how to keep the hovel livable, fix those farm implements they use for plowing behind the oxen and structural visualization is a useful tool in their brains for doing this. There is also something to be said for planting grain, nurturing it to maturity, harvesting it, and using prudence for the future [saving enough seed for next year's plantings and keeping it away from the rats], and using structural visualization to envision the world in four dimensions--looking to the past and future [as time is now defined as the fourth dimension--not the forth dimension as we look to going into space]--and desperately seeking refuge from marauding bands of raiders and the occasional invading armies passing through their farmland. Technologists in the city had opportunities too, although somewhat limited to building houses, and a real niche market, making as it were, weapons of mass destruction like swords and spears, chariots, harnesses, armor and all such other implements of war commonly used in those times--with war, as always, being a boon to technologists of every time in history, if only they were in the right place at the right time. But let us step forward to a kinder, gentler time: The United States in 1893 [ten years after the birth of my grandmother]. The sun never set on the British Empire, and Britain ruled the world in such far flung countries as India--spreading civilization Western Judeo Christian Style with hierarchical dominance aided by a fledgling industrialization. Telephones had been invented: It was 1876 in Boston that Alexander Graham Bell uttered his first declared "Watson, come here, I want you", and phones have been intruding on our lives ever since. But as the capital of finance and industry, it was New York that first put the telephone to use. Just a year after that first telephone call, the American Bell Telephone Company granted its first license in New York. A year after that, 252 customers subscribed to the city's first telephone exchange. Most were businesses, because, at $150 a year, a telephone was too expensive for private use. The caller turned a crank, lifted the receiver, and asked the operator to connect him or her to the desired person.
The steam engine and the telegraph was a boon to industry, making travel more viable; but for those who have read "Alone" by William Manchester [about Winston Churchill set in the 1920s and beyond to the 1940s] or the book, "Titanic" [not the movie version], there should be a realization that the British Empire was built on the backs of the poor lowly worker who was forced into hard labor as many as 16 hours or more a day, along with his children in some cases, contrasted with the royalty and gentry who lived as "ladies" and "gentlemen" of a heavily classed society: Potential technologists in the lower classes would never develop nor be recognized in spite of their talent because they were considered sub human [and this, in one of the better countries of the world at that time]. Real opportunities existed in the United States, though, because even though there were upper classes of "old money" running things [presumably they didn't have very many who had structural visualization among them], the "common person" had a LOT more freedom to pursue technology [oh, just forget the black people couldn't vote, and women couldn't either!]. In the United States, how the West was won, was through superior technology. The last spike for the transcontinental railroad was driven in Promontory, Utah, May 10, 1869! Just think!
There was no paved Interstate Highway across the United States; there were few, if any paved streets, even--most cities had mud for streets during the rainy season; there wasn't a vast network of telephones; there were no automobiles; movies were invented by William Dickson in 1889, directed by Thomas Edison, the wax cylinder phonograph was first patented by Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in 1886 and Thomas Edison marketed his version of the phonograph in 1888 as a dictation machine. In 1878, Edison created his prototype incandescent light bulb: a thin strip of paper, attached to wires, enclosed in a vacuum inside a glass bulb. When electricity flowed into the paper "filament," it heated up, and glowed--the only problem was that the paper burnt out very quickly, but After thousands of tests, an "Edison Pioneer," Lewis H. Latimer, found the optimal filament material in 1897: carbonized cotton thread. Edison installed the first reliable, durable electric lights in his own labs, and later built the first public power station, in Manhattan's financial district in 1882; however, Edison's DC-current system had only a three-mile range, and was later superseded by Westinghouse's and Tesla's AC-current system. Edison was more of an entrepreneur than a technologist, proclaiming that "invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration", although, as with many who "borrowed" ideas, it is not always clear that the inspiration was his.
Most people don't realize that in a year like 1893, there were no refrigerators: There were iceboxes; how it worked was that periodically, a guy would come by in a horse drawn wagon with a huge block of ice and stopping at each house, he would chop off a substantial piece with an axe--let's say a couple or three cubic feet of the stuff--and would put it in the bottom of a metal cabinet where you kept your perishables; the ice would cool the foodstuffs, would melt, repeat. There were no electric stoves, microwaves, electric Teflon non-stick pressure cookers, electric crock pots; mostly there were wood stoves: The stoves were made of cast iron, but burned wood; let me just say that I grew up with one in our home and while it was relatively easy to cook in pots on top of the stove, once you got the fire going with some paper and wood sticks for kindling, but it was real tricky to bake things in the oven, and you have to admire the farmer's wife [as was my grandmother, originally from the Pennsylvania Dutch Country] for being able to bake bread and make tasty pastries; I know, I tried my hand at making bread in one of these stoves when I was a lad, and keeping the oven temperature just right is really hard! In my time, too, there was a room and a path, not a room and a bath; I must say that my dad was the penultimate technologist and could make or fix anything in his time; we had a two-holer on the hill well-constructed with the crescent shaped moon and all, and I spent many a happy day there with the Sears Catalog, and the old issues were particularly useful for, uh, wrapping things up, so to speak; we are eternally indebted to the technologist who invented toilet paper. That all ended in 1952 when my dad finally dug the cesspool and we had indoor plumbing and a real shower with hot and cold running water.
Communities across the United States were still dominated by an agrarian basis which lasted up until about 1972, at which point, the United States began the transformation to an industrial basis. In these far flung communities, there were several things common to them--at least for the most part. The first thing was the railroad and the telegraph and the local newspaper, because these were the main, and sometimes the only link, to other parts of civilization; the railroad brought the mail--most people don't realize that the Pony Express only lasted from April 3, 1860 to late October, 1861--a run of only about 18 months: It was the railroad that ended the career of the some 183 brave riders [yet another example of technology putting people out of jobs!].
The station master had to master American Morse Code--the original Morse Code established by Samuel Morse some time in the 1840s; International Morse Code was adopted around the turn of the century in 1901 by most European Countries, but American Morse Code--differing by retaining the "long dashes"--remained the standard in the United States and continued to be used by railroad and inter-city land-line operators well into the 1960s. Generally, there would be a large pendulum driven clock standing behind the safety of the metal screen against the wall--the metal screen, both protecting the clock and the station master or his designee from harm from rowdy scoundrels; it also provided an opportunity to provide some sort of shutter which could be closed at the end of the day and making it impossible for other scoundrels to make it to the telegraph equipment, mail, merchandise, or the money in the safe. The clock, often one of the old Regulator Clocks, acted as sort of a metronome for the station, often lulling the passengers sitting in the wooden benches designed by the same craftsman who designed the pews for the local community church. Railroads were controlled by the government through the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, giving great benefit to farmers who had suffered at the hands of unreliable schedules and arbitrary practices of local railroad lines up to that point. I grew up in a small town with a train station, with Mr. Whipple as the Station Master, the old Regulator Clock against the wall [a marvelous piece of technology for its time], the telegraph chattering away to itself, passengers seated on wooden pews; and outside, there was a siding with this huge water tower, towering over fifty feet, with the tank a good 20 feet off the ground on "stilts"; indeed, the engineer would take the steam engine off to the siding, swing the water spout around to the boiler to fill it, and then went chugging on its way with the bell clanging; the tower was not perfect and leaked a bit; enough in the winter time that it formed stalagmites and stalactites and several solid columns of ice; it was a mile walk in the snow from our home at the edge of town to school, with the tower on the way, and I would stand under one of the ice cycles, open my mouth and let drops of water drip on my tongue. Most mornings, we would be up by five, fix breakfast, milk the cow, separate the milk into milk and cream into tin milk and cream cans, respectively, and my dad would drive by the train station on the way to work to drop off the cans; the cans would be taken from the platform and loaded into the baggage car; the train then traversed to Spokane where it stopped right by Darigold where the cans were unloaded and processed; as members of the Darigold Cooperative, we would receive modest checks for pin money once a month. All the mail in and out of town went by rail. These were the days that a gallon of gas cost a dime, a new automobile from the Highway Garage cost $400, and a two cent Liberty Stamp would send your first class envelope any where in the country without a zip code [letters and cards mailed to go to other town residents were simply marked, "City" and delivered to the appropriate mailbox without a stamp]. Lots of farm equipment and supplies were shipped. These were the memories of the early Fifties. Then, somewhere around 1957, I noticed something disturbing: There were these mail trucks stopping at the US Post Office at 98004! They came all the way from Seattle or Spokane! This was not good! What about the mail on the train? Good question. In due time, the train did not make a regular stop in Sprague, and the mail pouch was thrown from the train, while someone on the caboose would take a gaff and hook a rope hung as a triangle from which the outgoing mail was attached, and the snagged mail pouch would be swung on to the caboose without the train stopping. Any passengers would have to get Mr. Whipple to lower the signal to get the train to stop. Steam Locomotives were replaced by Diesel Locomotives and by 1958 there were no more Steam Locomotives going through town anymore--another victim of technology moving on--out with old, in with the new. Soon, the old water tower was gone. It wasn't too long after that the station closed. Then the station was torn down. And today, there are twin gravel roads where the station used to be, with no evidence there ever was a train station. And the Mail Trucks only have to go one mile out of the way to the Post Office from the freeway, after Interstate 90 bypassed the town, displacing the old highway. Haven't been back for 20 years. And now we step back again to the 1890s. There was a time though, that little town prospered and had a major hub for the railroad; in fact, at one time, Sprague was the County Seat, and here's the story:
The farmers had been enticed to come to the West by the Homestead Act of 1862 because each was provided 160 acres of free Federal Land for living on it and improving it for five years [one wonders how the Weyerhaeuser Family managed to obtain large tracts of land from the Federal Government in the nineteenth century, the tracts of which became the basis for their wealth in the 20th century?]. The drawback was the isolation. The farmers have always been a pragmatic group, and soon, in 1875, they founded political alliances known as Granges, wherein groups of farmers formed an alliance to band together to cooperatively buy farming equipment so it would cost less per farmer: This led to other alliances which led to reforms, one of which was the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Grange supplies and Co-ops still exist today particularly in small towns, and help bind small farming communities, providing goods and equipment for people in the area. Technologies change and technologists change with it. Farmers are no exception to that, except, in their view of things, things change much more slowly; after all, they view technologies in terms of seasons and years, they must be more patient, they are subject to the vagaries of weather, have to plan for the long term. Farmers have to adapt to the long term, and I know this because my grandparents were wheat farmers, and my dad was the county road shop crew foreman in a wheat farming community; each year, he would take vacation time and go work for my grandfather to harvest the crops, and mostly fix the badly designed, ill-tempered threshing machine built by lesser technologists and ruined by marketing. My dad could fix anything back then, and taught me the craft of welding [and I can lay a pretty mean bead as a result, but wouldn't want to do it full time], kept up the trucks in tip-top condition, and to this day, some 20 years later as of this writing, people speak his name in awe and reverence, for he had built a solid reputation of service as a technologist in the community. Of course, there was that unfortunate incident with Ed Ferrichs blasting a well in his yard: My dad knew dynamite, and told Ed that he was using too much powder, but Ed was somewhat headstrong; as Ed pushed the plunger, my dad was running for the street on the other side of the house from the blast; and not a moment too soon either, for it was four times the blast Ed expected and big rocks and debris flew clear over the house, chasing my dad; fortunately there were no injuries, but there was a big hole in the back yard! Salesmen who know farmers, know how to approach them, because they know the "farmer type" and the farmer won't just buy something off the shelf on a whim; they study the problem, they go away, they think about it, and when they are sold, they go buy it, and nothing can deter them--you have to convince them initially that it will contribute to their survival in some way. Farmers have fallen on hard times and the skills to be a farmer are more difficult to come by all the time, for, as technologists, a farmer must have skills in mechanics and welding, as well as all the aforementioned skills to keep his rural business going. Farming communities usually are small, and in speaking of small towns, Bob Hope said, "In small towns, people are so narrow their ears overlap". A true story in the little town of 495, 595 or 695 people, depending upon which bullet hole-ridden sign you read coming into town: Each day, the firehouse / town hall / library blew the noon whistle; now, these were the days when the you dialed "0" for Operator, and you could ask her the time; she kept getting a call from someone who would ask her the time; then one day she asked why the person called for the time; "Oh," the person said, "I use your time to blow the noon whistle"; there was this pregnant pause; "But I set my watch by the noon whistle," the operator said. Technology can appear in little towns that you might not expect. AT&T, that bastion of Ma Bell, right up until the breakup, after which we had terrible staticy long distance for years, had a microwave tower a couple of miles outside town, just past the town dump where my dad, brothers and I used to shoot rats with the guns, gunpowder and bullets my brothers made; there were towers about every 40 miles across the country to relay telephone, telegraph and television pictures by microwave. I had a friend who let us in to look around, and it was the most amazing thing to see back in those days: Banks of gold-plated triode vacuum tubes to amplify microwave signals; monitors, relays, switches of all sorts; and plug panels of all sorts where transmissions, and were, monitored without anyone knowing about it long before the NSA, FBI or CIA got involved; we overheard a husband wife arguing long distance, for example; it was the jet age, versus the space age, version of plug and play: Plug in the earphones and play the conversation! [I'll bet you never knew we did this! How could you?] It was great making a hobby of wiring up power supplies and relays to make binary counters when I was in high school, from materials discarded from the AT&T Microwave Tower! Before we leave the topic of telephones and technology, it should be noted here that there used to be banks of operators in places in New York, who had the job of plugging and unplugging phone jacks to connect and disconnect customers from one another; this gave way to newer switching technology and it was feared that technology would displace jobs; this fear was unfounded back then because even though the nature of the job changed, technology created new jobs; and that tradition has continued. Until QWest. It's a little unsettling to be talking to a service representative about the new QWest DSL service displacing the QWest MSN DSL service on the day that the representative has been told his job had been displaced! But we return from our digression. Near the end of the nineteenth century, technologies of a primitive sort in light of the modern era began to take shape. No, by 1893, things were just getting started good for the technologist. World War I & World War IIThere's nothing like a good war to stir the juices of good technologists everywhere and World War I was an opportunity like no other. By this time, the Wright Brothers had made their 59 second historic flight of December 17, 1903, going some 120 feet the very first time, and made the 852 feet (260 meters) for the last--the 59 second flight; it was around noon and the plane was pretty much toast, never to fly again as the wind turned it over--so they all went to lunch and that was the end of that. While Charles Lindbergh didn't make his historic flight alone across the Atlantic until 1927, World War I had its aircraft in the air. Now you have to understand that while World War I was quite a dirty war, fought in the mud in Europe between 1914, just after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, until Germany signed an armistice with the Allies November 11, 1918 at 11:00; but for the technologists and the fly boys it was Glorious! For one thing, someone discovered early on that airplanes couldn't shoot at each other without shooting their own propellers off--thus ending the conflict in the air--and they hadn't gotten around to dropping bombs much from the airplane: No, they were just observers, except for dropping the bombs, and the pilots from the enemy camps smiled and waved at each other as if they were the best of friends gone for an outing on a Sunday Afternoon. In between the first War to end all Wars and the Second War to end all Wars, technologists had a fine time of it. Radar was invented, although it isn't clear whether the inventor was a victim of his own invention, getting caught in a radar trap or not. Radio was not only invented, it was screaming from 50,000 Watt stations all over the place, and the first radio networks appeared. TV was invented by the British, but disappeared from sight until the Americans became interested in it. And the movies had talkies, replete with dancing AND singing. Vaudeville moved to radio with such great entertaining shows as George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Fibber Magee and Molly.
Artillery and munitions got better, much better, because when it comes to preparing and going to war, the technologist is at his or her finest, having, as it were, more resources available to them than usual, plus, necessity being the mother of invention and all, the necessities of invention were perceived to be vital to survival. The problem shooting off your own propeller was fixed by synchronizing the firing of bullets with the turn of the engine so the bullets would go between the propeller blades, not through them. And as a footnote to history, World War II ended in 1945, punctuated by the triumph of technologists who created and managed to deliver the most frightening and devastating invention of our time, the Nuclear Bomb. The rest, as they say, is history. Except. Except.
The invention? Laser! Well, that's a technologist for you! Leave them alone and they'll dream up something that starts out as a mind experiment, then a toy in a lab, and ends up something none of us can do without. Most technologists are such marvelous, talented people. Technology is supposed to make things better!This is another insidious myth which begs the question, "What's better?". As a tool in the wrong hands, technology has been a bust rather than a boon. Sure, technologists created refrigerators [and the pr guys created a demand for them], but that old Freon became problematic at best for the ozone layer. Making paper creates lots of sulphur, turpentine and chlorine, along with other obnoxious things quite damaging to the environment--besides, the stuff just plain stinks. After a visit to the largest paper mill of its kind in the world, and after enduring the stench for three days, I had done the right thing: I took a shower every night [I had started out on earlier trips by taking a shower in the morning--I was a slow learner!] in the hotel room in Paris, Texas and put my exposed clothes in a black plastic garbage bag, inside another black plastic garbage bag. When I get home, I open the luggage, then the bags in the bedroom and rush to the washer to dump the clothes in. Too late. My family is complaining about the stench and wonder if the plumbing is backed up. One of the mill techs, actually more a political animal than anything, told me proudly how shrewd the mill management had been lobbying: They went to the state legislators and got them to pass a bill to underwrite funding for highways in the state under certain circumstances; then they went to US Congress and got them to pass similar laws at the federal level; and guess where the only place in the whole country those two laws are effective and intersect? You got it. The road right in front of the mill. Is it any wonder that the Vision Statement for the Business is, "Leader of the Pack"? Doesn't that suggest they are a bunch of wolves? Anyway, for each new technology, the right thing to do is to examine if the new technology may have some unexpected downside that may not have come out in development and testing. Sometimes you can mitigate problems with new technology by inventing even newer technology and not be a victim of your own success. Unless management greed and short-sightedness gets in the way. Witness the problem with the two digit dates before the Year 2000: I blame accounting [and by implication, management] because all of us technologists were constrained from buying disk space sufficient to accommodate four digit dates; so we did the best we could and packed as much as we could with what we were given; it worked out though, accounting and management had to pay BIG bucks for us to fix the problem they were behind in the first place, and everybody was happy, celebrating and all, that we didn't have a big problem with it. [I made a conscious choice in 1972 to used two digit years, and for those systems, it paid off, since they didn't exist past 1986; with later systems I made some changes and everything worked out just fine--I just hope no one is still running them in 2050; heck, MPE i/X won't run past the year 2027 anyway.] If you'd have just given us what we asked for in the first place, you wouldn't have had to spend billions of dollars later. Not that it isn't prudent to insist, for example, that while you will keep your technologists happy with technotoys, they MUST get at least three quotes before they go on a spending spree--sometimes a little restraint can produce a great deal of prudence and good judgment. Anyway, management and technologists should work together--not that that's going to ever happen again in our life time--to make sure that they don't widely distribute new technologies until there is an assessment for potential damage and mitigations are developed, even if you can't think of everything. It's the right thing to do. PsychopathsThere doesn't seem to be a definitive study about differentiating psychopaths from technologists who are psychopaths, but Dr. Robert Hare has made a study about corporate executive psychopaths called "Snakes in suits and how to spot them".
Most are non-violent [only because violence doesn't interest them at the time], but all leave a trail of havoc through their families and work environments, using and abusing colleagues and loved ones, endlessly manipulating others, constantly reinventing themselves. Dr. Hare puts the average North American incidence of psychopathy at one per cent of the population, but the damage they inflict on society is out of all proportion to their numbers, not least because they gravitate to high-profile professions that offer the promise of control over others, such as law, politics, business management ... and journalism [technologists sort of knew this all along].
Enter the B-Scan test: It won’t be available to everyone, and it won’t be free--slightly jarringly, one is reminded that its authors are businessmen as well as academics, but they insist that it will do a better job of raising warning flags than traditional screening techniques such as CVs (routinely falsified and seldom checked) and interviews and role-playing (“Psychopaths love this stuff,” Dr. Hare says, “It’s like a game to them.”). If you are B-Scanned, it won’t be you answering the questions: It will be your colleagues, grading your personal style, interpersonal relations, organizational maturity and antisocial tendencies according to sixteen buzz words, none of them uplifting. The collection of words include the following: insincere, arrogant, insensitive, remorseless, shallow, impatient, erratic, unreliable, unfocused, parasitic, dramatic, unethical and bullying. In the workplace such a person might resemble “Dave”, a real individual studied by Dr. Babiak who cut a swath of disruption through a highly profitable American electronics company in the mid-1990s. Dave was good-looking, well-spoken and impressive in the interview that led to his recruitment. He was also a skilled and shameless liar, rude to subordinates, scheming towards his boss and quickly friendly with the firm’s top management. Already on his third marriage by his mid-thirties, he was short-tempered, happy to ignore assignments that he felt were beneath him, and quick to change the subject if challenged on a lie or asked to produce some real evidence of work. When his boss summoned the courage and evidence to make a complaint to the company president, he found that Dave had got there first and secured for himself the status of “high-potential employee”. The boss ended up sidelined. Dave ended up promoted, swaggering and “in love with himself”. He scored 19 on a test called PCL-R, lower than you would expect for a psychopathic murderer but much higher than your average working non-psychopath. He or she would score a 5 at most. It all seems obvious that there are a lot of psychopathic managers, but for the past 10 or 12 years, for most of corporate America, it hasn’t been obvious. These have been tumultuous years in the world of business, with dot-coms booming and collapsing, older firms merging or shrinking to catch up, and hierarchies everywhere flattening faster than the boss can say: “Hey, c’mon in, my door is always open.” In short, it has been a high old time for psychopaths. “When you see what has happened with Enron and WorldCom and all these other big corporations, and you ask how the hell could this guy get in that position, well, there are answers,” Dr. Hare says. “When the structure’s not there, when charisma is extremely important and style wins over substance, and one person ends up with three or four hundred million pounds in an offshore bank account, I start to get suspicious. And when the whole thing breaks and people are losing their pensions and livelihoods, these people give nothing back. “Many of the high-level executives now being charged knew exactly what they were doing. They had no concern for anybody else, and you have to say they aren’t warm, loving guys.” Likewise in politics. “Think what happened in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. The old rules went by the board. Structure vanished and all the ethnic tension that had been held in check by central government began to emerge. It was the perfect set-up for an opportunist, a thug or a psychopath to enter and take over.” That takeover usually has three stages:
Psychopaths necessarily have victims, and Dr. Hare’s drive to expose the “subcriminal” ones in our midst is at least partly personal: He speaks of an old college friend, now gravely ill, who lost $500,000 in a mortgage scam to a white-collar crook who got off with a $100,000 fine and a six-month trading ban; society still labels such people rogues at worst; Dr. Hare calls them natural-born predators; I call them scoundrels. There is a difficulty approaching all this from outside academe: it can seem as if the experts are using jargon to force a thousand shades of gray--for there are surely at least that many degrees of psychopathy--into convenient boxes for personnel managers, employment tribunals and courts. Dr. Babiak certainly counsels caution: Being psychopathic is not a sin [Comment: By definition a psychopath is a narcissist without a conscience, and a narcissist is a person who puts himself first, thus breaking the First Commandment about having other gods before you--so Dr. Babiak may be in error], let alone a ground on its own for dismissal, but the underpinning of the PCL-R is hard science, hard to ignore. Before he published it, Hare performed two now-famous studies which suggest that psychopaths really are different from the rest of us. In the first, subjects were told to watch a timer counting down to zero, at which point they felt a harmless but painful electric shock. Non-psychopaths showed mounting anxiety and fear. Psychopaths didn’t even sweat. In the second, the two groups had their brain activity and response time measured when asked to react to groups of letters, some forming words, some not. Words such as “rape” and “cancer” triggered mental jolts in non-psychopaths. In psychopaths they triggered precisely nothing. So, along with dealing with "normal people" lacking structural visualization, technologists have to deal with psychopathic managers and executives in the work place. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work promises to be a best seller in 2006, at least among technologists, for sure. And there's The CorporationThe documentary, "The Corporation" takes two hours to ask and answer the question: If a Corporation is a person, what sort of person is it? The answer is that the Corporation is a psychopath:
See the synopsis of the Movie, The Corporation. Don't let Technologists get boredA story of two bored chemists on a summer dayThere's nothing to do this afternoon. Let's do something interesting and creative. I know, let's make some nitroglycerine! So they got out their magic vials of glycerin and nitric acid and mixed it in just the correct proportions of hydrochloric acid to "dry" it out--remove the excess water--all at the right temperature, of course. Because these guys were really quite brilliant chemists; and because they knew how to do it; and they knew the best processes of how to do it. For your information, nitroglycerine is the chief component, along with sawdust packed in a waxed paper tube, of dynamite, invented by that intrepid Alfred Bernhard Nobel, a Swedish chemist, engineer, aspiring author and industrialist in 1866, who created a legacy in his 1895 will, with the establishment of the Nobel Peace Prize. What dynamite and peace have to do with each other is anyone's guess, but that's the trouble with trying to figure out technologists sometimes. And nitroglycerine, being the chief component of dynamite, is pretty powerful stuff--and like a woman who suspects her man of cheating on her, needs to be treated with the utmost care. And here were these two chemist guys who had made a whole gallon of the stuff. I don't know. It's a guy thing. I think you had to be there. Anyway, being chemists, and good ones at that--in spite of their suspect judgment--did know the best way to get rid of it, more or less, safely. They very very very carefully poured it slowly down the toilet. The excess moisture of the water in the toilet did its job and made the powerful explosive little more than a very strong astringent. Ah, yes, better things for better living: Dupont Explosives. Maybe they could have made little sublingual tablets for treating heart patients. We'll never know. Anyway, the point is, you really can't have bored technologists on your hands without risking risky behavior from people who may have momentary lapses in judgment. TransformationSome of you are probably thinking that sometimes technologists are a little strange, but we've not heard of similar incidences with female technologists, so we suspect that much of the strangeness is just testosterone poisoning. But be warned: Women Technologists, though more rare than men for reasons related to genetics transmitting structural visualization, are every bit as talented and effective at their craft--and sometimes much more so because of reasons revealed previously. Now society, being what it is, and talented people being what they are, often have conflicts. This is particularly true of technologists who have inherited structural visualization to a strong degree, versus those people who have none. And guess who usually works for whom? Yes, technologists work for management and management usually has NO structural visualization. No, management objectifies human beings to being mere ciphers to be manipulated in a "plug and play" environment--best understood by reading Robert Jackall's seminal work, "Moral Mazes": Managers believe that one person is just as good as another and one person can be pulled out of a job or task and can be replaced by another in an assembly line fashion. Because managers usually don't have a clue about points of view, inherited aptitudes and such, they really aren't very good at measuring a person's technical expertise and don't really have any insight into what makes a good technologist or doesn't; furthermore, the manager or director doesn't care about anything [these days] except the bottom line. The only results management understands are project reports, spread sheets, and time cards--or their modern equivalent: You thought this planet had carbon based life--but for management, it's paper based life. Because most managers have abstract visualization, they believe in the values of "perception is reality" and "the end justifies the means". This is anathema to the technologist who sees how things really work and knows the reality goes far beyond perception and the only way that the end justifies the means is if it is technically feasible--and just doing what you want and trying to avoid or break the "laws" of physics just doesn't qualify. Period. So technologists see managers as stupid and managers see technologists as trouble makers who must be restrained and redirected to accomplish their objectives and agendas. When managers say, "perception is reality", they should be challenged to see the movie, "A Beautiful Mind"; let them see it; then ask innocently, "How can the perception of a person with schizophrenia be reality?"; it's a springboard for many interesting philosophical discussions. Now you have to understand that because technologists can "see" thing in three or four dimensions, they are also capable of "seeing" things in two dimensions. Most managers can only see things in two or fewer dimensions [Proof: Consider the manager who keeps saying, "What's your point?!"--and not realizing that's ONE dimensional thinking!]. So what's the perfect solution--from the manager's point of view? Why, it's, "Let's make the technologist a manager!". What a brilliant idea! Not! Here's the deal: Yes, technologists can do all the functions, pretty much, that a person without structural visualization can do, provided they have sufficient graphoria [the ability to do paperwork--and in this case, a LOT of paperwork], while the reverse is probably not true! [And so what does Boeing do? They "lay off" 120 managers, by "breaking" them down to Specialist 6 and firing the Specialist 6's; they give the Specialists 60 day warn notices, during which the Specialists train the erstwhile managers and then leave to let the managers take their jobs. So what you have are possible incompetents taking over highly skilled jobs requiring talents and abilities the replacements probably don't have! Wanna fly with me?] When you replace a technologist with a manager, you have the chauffer fixing the engine; when you take a finely honed, world-class technologist and make them a manager, you are taking a skilled mechanic and making them the chauffer--to drive the corporate carriage of state who knows where. But the destination is not the problem because in modern business, management works in "teams"--not understanding that working on most technology is a rather solitary endeavor. Over lunch at the cafeteria in Weyerhaeuser on the headquarters corporate campus, an engineer of my acquaintance told me that the company was making the six engineers in his unit into a high performance work group--the Weyerhaeuser equivalent of the "team"; he asked me, as a technologist turned manager--a mistake I will never repeat--"What will I do?"; he looked pained; "I don't know what to do! I work alone! I've never worked with other people before! I'm just not comfortable with this! I'm not a people person!"; I looked at him sadly and thought, "Go with the flow, I guess". There isn't a Human Resources Department anywhere worth its salt that doesn't have overheads of "forming, storming, norming, performing, reforming" with the public and private exits marked in the appropriate places, and if they're really good, they can drag out the "persecutor, victim, rescuer" triangle; in short, HR has a program for creating teams, teams, teams! And that's what management wants... they think. Warning: Be careful what you ask for, because you may a victim of your own success. Because technologists may actually form teams. Not the teams you intend. They may bond. At that point, you will lose ALL control of them, because they will have gone off TOGETHER to have fun. There isn't a technologist worth his salt who can't hide what he is doing from you. Together, a TEAM of technologists, can hide the Seventh Armored Tank Division. They have the keys to the kingdom. They are the fox guarding the chicken house. They have the technology. And you have set them against you. You are the enemy. Nothing but nothing, short of obliteration of the whole team will rescue you from them. Oh, sure, on the surface, they will be doing their job and rendering their near perfect or better "customer service", but under the covers they will be playing head games with you. They will be carrying on about Star Wars, the Latest James Bond Movie, the Last Star Trek Movie amongst themselves, and you won't be able to stop them. Productivity may or may not drop like a rock. They can bring CDs with the latest episode of "South Park" and it's totally untraceable. Be suspicious if you walk by and hear a kid's voice say, "Timmy!" or "Kenny!". You are doomed. And there is nothing you can do about it. Best of all, you and HR have together created this TEAM! It's the perfect revenge. Against you. It's dangerous to muck around with technologists, because they recognize abuse the nanosecond they see it. And they WILL deal with it. In ways you could never prove in court--and by the way, they can alter and delete the records any time they want. Given a choice, technologists forced into non-technical work requirements, generally will opt to change jobs or retire; it's take the money and run--from bad management which wants to take a winning game to a losing one by changing the successful habits and processes of their technical staff. Personnel often, in their abstract visualization way, will dream up new programs from the research written by other personnel professionals in other companies [they talk together, you know, mostly to figure out how the best way to fire employees in the downsizing exercises they go through], which will work for the white collar workers, but may not do much for the technical staff [and for hiring, personnel does NOT have a CLUE how to make an effective selection--I should know, I've gone through 700 resumes just to hire a computer operator: The best operator turned out to be someone with no computer experience--he knew how long each process took, how to organize the backups, how do perform everything efficiently, and in two days he was already doing a better job than operators with 10 years experience! Sometimes it takes talent to spot talent!]. So the rest of management takes the technologist into their camp and make him [or rarely her--because the women know better] one of them. Voila! Problem solved. Or is it? It's more like Voila in Oila! [boiled in oil]. The fresh new manager is now transformed into a triumph of image over substance. In order to fit in [again, reference "Moral Mazes" if you have doubts], the newly designated keeper of all power and glory, must dumb himself down to be assimilated into the borg collective of empty-headed twits who have no clue as to how things work--the only thing they know is how they THINK things work--which isn't the way they work at all. But given this artificial rarified abstracted reality in "the monkey tree", with everybody climbing the vines and striving for the top banana slot, image is all a person has--and a lot of middle managers ask at the end of their career, "What's the point?". What is moral is what your management peers and the others above the impenetrable glass ceiling which traps the technologists beneath, is what the rest of your motley little, superior acting, arrogant, narcissistic group wants from you. You thought, as a technologist, that you could change things and make them better for your fellows, if only you had the chance to be a manager! The reality is that you get swept along in the undercurrent of business politics, devoid of any real substantive meaning, and if you rise above the rest, you will be singled out and be eliminated for not being "part of the team" and not being able to "network" effectively among the empty-headed twits you work with. I've seen this happen all too often, and the anecdotal evidence is more powerfully convincing empirically than any in-depth studies involving researchers who only have abstract visualization and only see statistics as realities. I've seen perfectly good technologists be ruined by running with the management crowd. One of two things happen: They either bail and go back to being technologists, or they end up compromising; they lie, they cover up the lies, the cover up the cover up the cover ups and make the whole thing undiscussible--in short, being the full flower of everything gone wrong in management; our boss admitted to us, "I have lied and I take full responsibility, but I know that if I wanted to have a career here and keep my job, this is the choice I had to make"; a perfectly good technologist, ruined! And now the whole thing is undiscussible. You need to watch the company you keep. Besides, management doesn't really understand what technologists do--they just see the results. Which is interesting, since the last BIG thing was "Enterprise Architecture". I went through one of those as a manager: It was a nine month exercise, taking as much as eight hours or more a day, five days a week--and you had to do your regular job too. We spent millions of dollars with a consultant who told us that no company had fully implemented "Enterprise Architecture", but not to worry, we could do it, if we were committed to it. Well. We happily and busily, as managers, went through this exercise in futility, by defining every function, process, task, tools, environment, qualifications we would need to take any kind of request at all, from the initial call, to completion, to follow-up; this included all the interconnection between people in different positions defined to perform the functions and tasks and maps of where requests would go and the technologies that would be necessary to achieve completion. It was a complicated thing, this "Enterprise Architecture" and an IBMer had written a rather slim, but expensive little paperback to describe how everybody from the CEO to the lowliest service representative taking the calls would have to commit to this process. There were some interesting results. Staff moved to a huge room filled with PCs, and there were three 96 inch screens on the wall, which were supposed to be maps which assisted service representatives in such things as indicating which nodes of the network had suddenly stopped working [this never actually happened to indicate in red which nodes were down, since the turkey setting up the software never got further than to have one red light appear on the screen like forever for a node which didn't even exist! Thanks, Gaylen!]. Anyway, it was quite impressive. And my peer quipped that if the project failed, they could turn it into a sports bar. I wonder how much they're charging for drinks there now? The Share ConferenceIn August, 2002, IBM Systems Programmers gathered for their semi-annual conference in San Francisco [a week after the Linux Conference which had over 21,000 attendees to the pathetic, at most 1,200, Systems Programmers]. It was a good conference and I learned a lot. Most entertaining was the keynote speaker, Dr. Robert Ballard, which, as many of you may know is an explorer of note who discovered such things as the sunken Titanic--the story of which was, that he was actually commissioned by the Navy to find two downed Nuclear Subs, and the Navy agreed to let him search for the Titanic while they funded the trip, but the purpose of the trip was to find the subs; this was supposed to be secret and was complicated by the filming crew from the National Geographic coming along for the ride to see him discover the Titanic; it all turned out, and the National Geographic folks never new that he had found the subs before they started filming the discovery of the Titanic, until the knowledge was declassified recently--years after the fact. Most disturbing was the announcement to the group by none other than the CEO of IBM telling the group there by video tape that he couldn't be there because, "I have more important things to do". This is not a good thing to do to technologists. They will do their jobs, they will bide their time, and when you need them most, but it isn't a job requirement for them, they can step away and leave you hanging for the few seconds before events take over and you to begin your plunge to what ever is below, if ever they get the chance. Remember, you need technologists for nearly everything in the modern world. The advice here is treat them nice. Some time after the key note speech by Dr. Ballard, there was a "birds of a feather" meeting between Systems Programmers and IBM employees, designed to be an idea session of how to induce more people to join the ranks of IBM Mainframe Programmers--a dying breed, if you ask me, both literally and figuratively: Most of the group of 60 or so were male, past 45, or at least past their prime [in another group of 200+, the speaker asked how many systems programmers were under the age of 35 and six raised their hands!], overweight, glasses--some of them coke-bottle thick--a few with false teeth--and many looking disheveled and unkempt [but what can we say, we value substance over appearance--if it runs, it runs!]. Now mind you, this was a group who was striving to resolve a BIG problem!
There was one good suggestion and that was to work with the Junior Colleges and Universities in your area to have them set up people to train and then commit to hiring them during or after their program in school. But my favorite was, "Show them the challenges of the job!". Oh, yeah, that really works! Get kids who want life to be fun and meaningful and a job which has a future, and give them a job to which they must commit, takes great effort and responsibility, doesn't have much of a future, is devoid of a GUI environment [the kind of which you are viewing now], and is complicated and difficult--and convince them to do this by telling them that it's challenging? As you might guess, I was not well received when I told them that they did not understand inherited aptitudes, points of view and generations in the work place: They wouldn't even let me finish the sentence and I was resoundingly shouted down. Let's step back a year from this event. There is a small but nifty user group for the HP3000 MPE i/X system which is called the HP3000-L [a mailing list] who are among the brightest, smartest, most intelligent people in the world, that, if given the opportunity, might just be able to collectively solve any problem. The group includes a broad spectrum of scientists [one or two were rocket scientists], a guy with two, count 'em, two PhDs, people who have written books, gone adventuring, taken professional pictures, printed calendars, written premier software in a number of venues, composed music, gone horse back riding, managed large centers, met presidents; and so on and so forth. Most of them are really good folk. And most of them are great technologists. However, their jobs and their futures are highly dependent upon one Vendor--HP [no longer called Hewlett Packard and we found that when we pealed back the label on the new servers we received, there, in glorious red letters was the COMPAQ logo--they haven't bothered to repaint them yet]. The trouble began some time in the middle of 2001, really, when HP announced that HP was going to merge with COMPAQ. Bah! They said. It will never happen! They said. Then came September 11, 2001 [the worst use of technology by non-technologists ever devised, in my opinion]. Ironically, HP had planned to gather with premier customers in the Trade Center Buildings in New York to announce their new mid-sized UNIX computers, but decided to have smaller regional meetings for the announcement; if they had done that, most of the HP management would have been wiped out along with their premier customers! It does appear that God was looking out for them for no particularly good reason any of us can determine at this point except, maybe, He was leading them to repentance (Acts 2:1); from our observations though, results are still a long way off, not unlike the benefits to the stock holders after the merger. Then began the real terrorism of the HP3000 Community November 14, 2001: The announcement that HP would no longer produce or support the HP3000--manufacture ends in October, 2003 and support ends in January, 2006. MPE i/X and the HP3000 is about to become extinct. And a lot of those Systems Managers who are still supporting them. Some will retire. Some will transition to another job or career [and hopefully it will not be one which requires them to ask, "Will you have that with fries?"]. You all probably know that the HP - Compaq merger did come to pass in spite of all denial from the beleaguered HP3000 community. Done. Dead. Dodo-ed. Great careers ended. Back to the Share Conference at the San Francisco Hilton for IBM Systems Programmers: It was with this background I heard the next most amazing thing! "Major Corporations will always need us", they said. "Nothing can replace the IBM Mainframe!", they said. Funny. I hears similar words about the HP3000 the year before from the HP3000 Community. I said nothing. Sometimes there's no explaining what you know.... There were some other interesting things at the Share Conference. I often strike up conversations with strangers and listen intently, for you never know where it will lead. Downstairs in the Hotel, I would go to this little--and expensive--store, which mostly stocked liquor--the really hard stuff (and there were quite brisk sales during the Conference)--to get my supply of orange juice, an apple and banana or two and beef jerky [I actually lost weight during the conference and I'm not complaining for its a GOOD thing (thanks, Martha!)]; there was a young dark Arab man there who explained to me that he was taking care of the store for his girlfriend's father who was sick; he told me that he had graduated from Lebanon University with a degree in computer science and had been in the United States for nine months for further education so he could get his dream job as an IBM type Systems Programmer [though I love my job, occasionally I loath it, and this was one of those times]; I did not have the heart to tell him what I did or what the conference was about; we discussed the Palestinian view of things and he brought up the fact that as a Muslim, the owner of the store was prohibited from selling liquor, and I said that it was gratifying that Americans weren't the only hypocrites and we both had a good laugh over that, but just to be sure, I never hinted where I live; anyway, I'm still kicking myself that I didn't tell him that if he wanted a good job with a US firm as a Systems Programmer, he should get his PHd and move to India [at least on service calls, he'd be more understandable in English than his peers there]. I hate San Francisco. I haven't so much as left my heart there as my pocketbook. The taxi ride on Sunday was a frightful expense and it was a good thing I was on per diem, even the meager one that is paid by the government; the hotel room--not too much better than a Motel 6 [which charges, what these days, $64 a night, depending?]--charged $209 before tax; and what could Sunday Brunch on the 47th floor cost anyway? I made the mistake of not asking in advance: $12, $25, tops you think? Nope! $35? Nope again! After taxes it came to $52! So they served four kinds of caviar? So what?! I just wanted some simple fare since I hadn't eaten in 9 hours! I'll never do that again, even if the expense account pays for it some how. Six blocks away, on a cool but sunny afternoon, I was approaching Nordstrom's, and what did I see, but some cool looking business man with his white Van Heusen Shirt and $75 tie, in his BMW convertible with the top down with the leather interior, talking on his cell phone, looking for a place to park? There were crowds of prosperous looking people. And there were homeless, not so prosperous looking people. A woman about 35, to be fair, not unattractive, leaning with her back against Nordstrom's was chugging from a whiskey bottle wrapped in a plain but rumpled brown paper bag. And the theme of the Conference I was attending was "Living the Dream". In one of those open covered bus stops, under the sign declaring the wonders of IBM Linux, was a solitary homeless black man sleeping, or trying to--definitely NOT living the dream. And I pondered. Technology is merely a tool, not an end in itself, no matter what you think. And I think that technology was used to do this by people who only care about their own prosperity and comfort. Maybe it's just paranoia...It does look a little like the world may be just a bit biased against technologists, in spite of computers, cell phones, PCs, the Internet, all the technotoys and gadgets these days. It's not hard to envision a world in which technologists are blamed for the world's ills and are hunted down like heretics during the Spanish Inquisition [instituted by Pope Gregory IX in 1231] or like witches in Salem [Massachusetts, not Oregon]. All it would take is for things to go wrong and not be fixable. Or that those with abstract visualization find a way to do without technologists. Or both. History often repeats itself. Structural Visualization is a marvelous gift, given to the very few and used to good effect by even fewer. Technologists live in a world poorly understood by those who are not technologists [heck, some of us still can't get our VCRs to work! Not to worry, they'll be gone in just a few more years, then we'll probably be using a Micro$oft product, sanctioned by law!]. If you have the gift, use it wisely and to help others. If you don't, appreciate those who do. What ever you do, don't try to become something you are not.
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At
first, the telephone companies hired telegraph operators to be phone
operators. But this created a problem. Telegraphers were a heavy-drinking,
rough-talking bunch. Sometimes, when customers complained about the
unreliability of the early phones, operators threatened to beat them up.
American Bell Corporation officials got fed up. Nice young ladies, they
realized, were raised to be polite; the company would hire them as operators.
Soon all operators were "hello girls."
For
the first time, people could ride the rails [probably this was a time slightly
before hoboes], all the way across the country, and, remember, ships had to go
all the way around the tip of South America to go from New York to San
Francisco because the Panama Canal was NOT completed until August 15, 1914!
Not
to worry, though: Thomas Edison did begin the transformation of technology as
a legacy from which we benefit today--Thomas Edison started us out on the road
to the Motion Picture Industry [and the billions it makes for its keepers
today] and marketed his phonograph as the first home musical entertainment
center in 1896 [but remember, this was before the days of "The Sound of
Music", or as it became in the 1970s, "The Sound of Musak"].
Yes,
we did have an electric water heater--not so efficient, I think, because Grand
Coulee Dam had excess capacity in the days when the cute little "Ready
Kilowatt" was selling electricity [not as today with a "Ready? Kill A Watt!"!]
(my dad actually worked on building the dam), but we used it to fill the big
metal tub to take a bath; or, in the summer, we had a smoke house that had a
metal tank above the smoke house that we filled with water, and let the water
heat it during the day, so we could take a shower in the afternoon [and we had
our own well, where it was only eight feet to water].
The
railroad station in a small town was usually a fastidiously kept wooden
structure with a long wooden platform adjacent to the railroad tracks where
the passengers could easily enter and exit the train [in some cases, the
passengers had to walk a ways and step up on little stools put down by the
conductor to board the train]; there was usually a siding which led to a very
large water tower; steam engines would chug up to the siding [usually burning
wood or coal in the furnace of the steam engine where the engineer was],
clanging its bell furiously and stop under the spout designed to swing over to
fill the locomotive water tank [water + heat = steam = pressure to power the
pistons which turned the wheels to push the train forward]; filled and
satisfied, the locomotive could resume its course, taking passengers, mail and
freight to the next town or city.
The
Great Tribulation--oops--the Great Depression had come and gone; funny though,
there are still a lot of people in great depression, many of them stock
holders of technology companies.
Gordon
Gould was sitting on a park bench [it has been rumored] when his first idea
for his invention flashed in his head one night in 1957.
