This is a true story. This has nothing to do with my usual manager-type ramblings, but it's so good it has to be shared. The names have been changed because all the names get changed.
To appreciate this story, it helps to know the victim, who is a sliderule-using, pocket-protector-wearing, tape-across-the-nose-of-his-glasses type of engineer. Not a bad guy, but definitely a nerd. Here we go...
I was lucky enough to meet RJ Mentes at my first job. I was straight out of college and pretty clueless in both life and plant engineering, and he was kind enough to help show me the ropes in both. I haven’t seen him much since I took the job at the gulag, but I think of him every so often when something really funny happens, because he has a sense of humor like a knuckleball – you never knew where it was going and its effects left its victims scratching their heads.
When RJ was a young man in the early 1970s, the US was involved in Vietnam , and young men were being gobbled up by the Army. He figured the best thing would be to enlist in the Air Force before he got drafted. In USAF basic training, he and his squad were sitting around shooting the bull when someone came up with the fact that if you have a group of 15 there is a pretty good chance that a pair will share a birthday.
One of the guys in his squad was named Mike Adnan, so of course they called him Madman. He didn't have many tools in his toolbox, and he had a strange, high-pitched staccato laugh that drove the rest of the guys nuts. When RJ got his turn so share his birth date with the squad, prefaced with the fact that he had never met anyone who was born that day, Madman squealed, “My brother Chuck has the exact same birthday – same year, same month, same day.”
Mentes made it through Vietnam and used the GI bill to enroll in what was to become his beloved Podunk state university. After graduating with an engineering degree he got a job at the plant where some years later I would join him.
The engineering department at this plant was large back then – over 50 people. The building we worked in was a large space with the engineer cubes arranged in an oval with the admins on the inside. Each section, which contained engrs who worked in a particular area of the plant, took one of the four quadrants. It was tradition that on your first day of work, your section leader would take you around the oval so you could meet each engineer.
RJ was half-way through the gauntlet when he heard that strange staccato laugh. His first thought was, “Oh no. Madman works here.” As he neared the source of the screech he started to look for the nameplate on the cube, and eventually he saw “Charles Adnan”. A plan hatched in his devious little skull.
As he and his boss approached Chuck, the boss introduced them. Since RJ was older than most rookie engrs, a common question around the oval had been, “What did you do before you came here?” Sure enough, Chuck asked the same question.
“I used to work in the circus,” said RJ.
“Really?” asked Chuck. “What did you do?”
“Well, among other things I used to guess people’s birthdays.”
“Really?” Fish on. Chuck’s eyes narrowed into slits. “OK. What’s my birthday?”
RJ put his hands to his head in concentration. “1954?”
“Yeah.” Chuck’s eyes opened a little, and he rocked back in his chair.
“April?” RJ said with a little more confidence.
“Yeah!” Chuck sat up straighter, anticipating.
RJ jabbed his finger at Chuck, accentuating each syllable. “April 5th!”
“Yeah!!” Eyes wide as saucers.
RJ’s boss*, who was now quite unsure of his new recruit's mystical powers, saw no alternative but to move to the next cube.
“See you around,” said RJ casually, leaving Adnan completely speechless.
It took three months before the people around the plant quit asking RJ to guess their birthdays.
*RJ's then-boss later became my boss, and gave me some good lessons in the fallibility of bosses. Not that I was a great designer or anything, but every time I was forced to use his input my project went to hell in a hand basket. One of the reasons I left for the gulag was because he offered me one day off after I had put in a bunch of 80 hour weeks to get a project done on time. Still, he was much more benign than the jokers at the gulag…
Comments
Post a Comment