[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.