Very interesting set of observations.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Surely there's an MK-Ultra connection somewhere.

That goes for those hard left guys as well. I've witnessed countless events where people freeze up in times of great stress. Those are ALWAYS the ones that think they have the only solution, when there are thousands available. That NOT to say these people are stupid...one case in particular involved a member of MENSA, a member and co-leader of the county's Democratic party, and a scientist on our team. Somehow, he got the power to design a machine to apply a coating he invented that is in use on 99% of aluminum automotive trim pieces in use today.

While building his brainchild, I pointed out, many times, how he overlooked a number of basic design flaws. My team was told that our job was to build what he designed. After building it to his specs, and him playing with it for 6 months, I was brought back into the project to make it work.

It's not a left/right thinking thing, it's a God complex thing.

In the end, it's usually the simplest fix that makes things work...getting back to basics is always the best. Keeping an open mind on the task, with a collective eye on the goal, will always prevail.

Sadly, our government is so filled with people with God complexes, that they all have lost sight of the final goal.

Just my $0.02...take it or leave it.

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1987 560SL
85,000 miles

If it doesn't fit my model, I ignore it.

Hard headed to the core.

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1987 560SL
85,000 miles

Good thing you didn't freeze up like you were supposed to.

Want to talk about a God complex, try dealing with Navsea 08 (Naval Reactors)!!

On one particular design plant, there was a central fresh water cooling system for all the steam plant equipment.

The casualty procedure they'd written in case there was a fault with this system, was to hook up temp hoses to all the electrical generator coolers, from the potable water tanks - IOW, to dump most of the ship's potable water supply to the bilge in order to maintain some level of cooling for the generators for a limited period of time.

Some of us enlisted knuckledraggers pointed out that the shore connections for the chilled water A/C system were in close vicinity to these generators. We had the temerity to suggest that instead of dumping potable water to the bilge, why not hook up a piping manifold to these chilled water connections, then run temp supply AND return hoses to the generators, and let the ship's A/C plant do the job, maintaining FULL electrical power for an indefinite period?

CO and Engineer thought enough of our proposal to write up a detailed description and submit it up the line to Navsea.

Three months later, Navsea responded by deleting ANY type of casualty procedure for this system for the entire ship class, saying that they had decided the odds of this particular system failing completely was practically nonexistent.

Yeah, riiiggghhttt.....

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Just say "NO" to Ethanol - Drive Diesel

Mitchell Oates
Mooresville, NC
'87 300D 212K miles
'87 300D 151K miles - R.I.P. 12/08
'05 Jeep Liberty CRD 67K miles
Grumpy Old Diesel Owners Club

We ran into stuff like that, too, and it usually was because someone way up the ladder had set up the system and their career was staked on the procedure working.

The only way we could find to correct such a situation was to wait until the person who was involved to get promoted or transferred and then to suggest to their replacement changes that needed to be made in the system.

Since they wanted to look good right away they would study our suggestions and if they could understand them they would suggest changes. I don't recall any instance where our suggestions were turned down by the new guy.

The big problem we had was we had to make stuff work even when the laws of Physics seemed against us. We always figured something out, but we never got used to explaining to Engineers how some of the stuff they came up with was just an accident waiting to occur.

[QUOTE=jplinville;2979023]That goes for those hard left guys as well. I've witnessed countless events where people freeze up in times of great stress. Those are ALWAYS the ones that think they have the only solution, when there are thousands available. That NOT to say these people are stupid...one case in particular involved a member of MENSA, a member and co-leader of the county's Democratic party, and a scientist on our team. Somehow, he got the power to design a machine to apply a coating he invented that is in use on 99% of aluminum automotive trim pieces in use today.

While building his brainchild, I pointed out, many times, how he overlooked a number of basic design flaws. My team was told that our job was to build what he designed. After building it to his specs, and him playing with it for 6 months, I was brought back into the project to make it work.

It's not a left/right thinking thing, it's a God complex thing.



I would put that in the class of being hard headed. We never tried to talk sense to people like that since it just wasted our time and upset them.

The situations I was mostly involved in would almost always include a life and death situation somewhere. I (or a person in the group on duty) had to take charge of the situation in the first five seconds or there was usually no time left to deal with it. You knew when you had it under control because nothing when boom.

But if you could not back off from the 'correct' procedure and deal with the situation depending on the factors involved, which usually numbered in the hundreds, then there was no happy ending.

It was a skill thing to be sure, but you had to adapt quickly because the thing that worked last time might work this time, but it might not.

We kept a log of responses so we could have them to refer to. It was hundreds of pages long and we wondered why we kept it since no one could ever find two situations that were alike.

We also had a book of procedures that had in big letters 'These procedures must be followed in the event of an emergency' but it was just in case anyone asked to see it. I cannot think of a single instance where the procedures were followed since every instance was different.

We would get asked if our jobs were like an airline pilots and we would tell people to think of driving a Semi at 100 mph on an icy highway. Now imagine driving ten of them at once.

That's what it was like.