On Aug 19, 10:01*am, robert bowman wrote:
Stu Fields wrote:
I've been offered a job with a contractor who provides service to DoD and
I've refused. *There ain't no dollar amount that would make me get in that
insanity again. *In fact I've been working on our magazine at no salary
for 6 years. *The government is not a solution. *It is a problem.

I worked on one DoD project. There were endless meetings in the attempt to
prepare a specification document where the topic of discussion was the
indentation and labeling of paragraphs. I lasted about 6 months, quit, and
went elsewhere. I talked to a friend who stayed about a year later. "Write
any code yet?" *"Nope", he said.

It was fun though, especially the resident spook who would lecture about the
evil Russkies lurking out in the town dump going through our garbage or
would explain the importance of removing all the printer ribbons before the
IBM CE came, just in case he was a Red too and could glean secrets from the
ribbon imprints.

I was always in Operations and we had more than plenty of work. We
were told once about indentations and labels, and that's all it took.
We didn't agonize over the one bestest way to do something. And we
destroyed our our ribbon tapes and shredded and burned our
classified. It worked well.

Agonizing over indentations and headings was something that we had to
do with contractor work. Because if we wanted headings on a document
to be changed from 16 font to 20, you would send your attorneys over
and renegotiate the contract for yet more money. Or statute miles vs
nautical miles. Sheesh.

If soldiers or airmen were doing the work, they would simply do a
global change and move on, while the contractors would be in a
quagmire for months.