Jim Wilkins wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...It took about 10
minutes, or twice as long as it took to do the paperwork. Threats of
unemployment can stop all the stupid games & delays.

Sometimes.

I built a custom data acquisition system for a Mac and asked the company
"Apple Certified Programmer" to estimate the time to write a driver for it.
He came back with three months. Not long after the company laid off the lazy
bum so I had to write the driver myself. I did it with four lines of
assembly code generated by LabVIEW.


I had a very flaky automated test set on of the engineers dumped on
manufacturing without finishing the software. He 'was too busy to fix
it' and said 'Fix the damn thing yourself'. There were no schematics,
and it was written in Quickbasic, so I had to find and fix all his
mistakes. Then I added real error messages that pointed to possible
causes for the failures. Since it was fully automatic, I added two
sound effects: If the board failed, it sounded like a fog horn. If it
passed, it sounded like an early video game. The head of test wasn't
amused, but I could fill out most of the paperwork for each board while
it ran. That more than doubled production throughput.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.