The Moscow Ballet is stranded right now in Casper Wyoming, because their busses won’t start…. Who’d a thought the USA was colder than the former USSR? It’s -31°C (-23.8°F) in Casper compared to their home, where it’s a sweltering -18°C (0.4°F).
Don’t forget the “order next higher assembly” scam.
Funny war story:
During my misspent youth as a member of Uncle Sugar’s Air Farce (the USAF), one of the common things we saw in the ordering of parts to repair the airplanes was that if we needed just, say, the mounting screws for a generator, CONgress would have gone through our supply manuals and inserted the dreaded words “order next higher assembly,” forcing us to replace a perfectly good generator because it was “more economical” to replace the whole mess (complete horse manure, of course… obviously the generator manufacturer had friends in CONgress).
Even worse, DIFFERENT CONgressional committees would go through the supply rules at different times and make multiple insertions so that you would try ordering screws and wind up receiving a whole airborne electronics rack! We of course found workarounds (a different gadget might use the same mounting screws, for example, which you could still safely order). However, since these workarounds were all “off the record,” there was no way to officially promulgate them across the service: the transport (MAC) bases only knew the workarounds for transport aircraft parts, fighter bases (TAC) only knew the shortcuts for fighter parts, etc..
One fine day, a B52 bomber landed at the transport base I worked at and had a problem with their compass. Since I had been a “pipeline instructor” (a student who did extremely well and was retained by the training base as a temporary instructor) at tech school, I knew how to repair Avionics systems on the BUFF (“Big Ugly Flying Blanker”), and was stuck with the job. HOWEVER, I had never ordered parts for B52’s, merely diagnosed and repaired them.
When I went out to the plane, I discovered that the problem was in the “flux valve transmitter.” Explaining exactly what such a transmitter is would be beyond the scope of this story, but just suffice it to say that it’s the little piece of wirewound magic, roughly the shape of a Frisbee and about a third the size, which detects Earth’s magnetic field and sends this info to the computers on board the aircraft. Since it senses such small magnetic fields, the device is located all the way out at the end of a wingtip, as far from all the electronics on board as possible, and is held in by non-magnetic screws. Some moron had used ordinary steel screws, which were throwing the transmitter’s readings out of alignment. So I naively went back inside and ordered 28 non-magnetic screws.
CONgress had inserted so many “order higher assembly” orders that do you know what showed up several weeks later? A WING. A complete-except-for-engines WING, one each, for a B52’s use of, costing over a million$, if I remember right… and they wanted my little butt to go out there and sign for it.
I didn’t, of course. Instead, I went to the end of it, pretending to inspect it, removed the 28 screws I needed… and turned the whole wing back in as non-serviceable! (I’m still laughing about it 30 years later).
>>10 Why are you quoting something that's already been said without adding anything?
Name:
Anonymous2016-12-11 15:56
>>10 What a nice doggie, always acting according to the reflex that the lying media have cultivated in you. Voice, doggie! Now roll over! Fetch! Good dog!
>>13 Not the first time a leftist can't come up with a comeback worthy of posting.
Name:
Anonymous2016-12-11 20:27
Whenever I want a laugh, I visit a far-left site like the Guardian:
Can you brainwash yourself using your sense of smell? Ecstasy sold in US is less pure and more dangerous than in Europe, experts warn Get out of my echo chamber. It's cosy in here Nigel Farage is not ‘controversial’ – he is toxic.