Motivational Poster Thread (warning content)

I was in a Mexican restaurant a few weeks back,, I went in, got sat in a booth ,, a few minutes later ,, I hear some Mexican music coming from the kitchen , sounded like it was coming from an old transistor radio , a few seconds later ,, this little motorized cart comes out of the kitchen playing that music with about 4 trays carrying food for different tables. That thing was programed to go to whatever table number they punched in. But they still had a waiter follow the thing and put your food on the table.
I don't see how they expect people to make a living if they're gonna build machines to do all the work.

 

Some knucklehead with silver bars on his collar told me decades ago that we'd have machines to fix equipment within a few years, and wouldn't need our truck mounted tool sets and test equipment. If we needed stuff like that it could be brought in by aircraft. That meant a static location rather than a shop that could move. His vision never panned out, but the tool sets all went away. Instead of fixing things in the field, or even in-country, huge stocks of repair parts were shipped to forward deployed units and they just hoped they had the right parts. I've yet to see a machine that turns a wrench outside an assembly line, or can complete a multi-system diagnosis. How about catching M60 tank crewmen who were pouring diesel fuel on top of their engines fan towers and reporting a leak so they could get out of the field at night? How do you program a machine to do that? I have seen whole warehouses full of freshly rebuilt components that were burned to useless scrap in forward deployed warehouses. They could've been saved if the fire fighting robots had been on duty...

 

Even in the early 1980s on my Navy ship, electronic repair was fast becoming simply "swap in a new module", and we weren't supposed to do component level repair, that was for "depot maintenance". The thing is, at some point the new modules run out. I had the great foresight, with suggestion of my ET Seniorchief, to go to the surplus warehouse on base and snagged a complete second set of the UHF radios I was responsible for, just as we were preparing for our deployment. Couldn't store the racks and cases, so those went overboard at pierside. Maybe still down there at NorVa's "D&S piers". I stashed the modules. At some point, even my extras ran out, as did those in Supply. I then put my model building experience to work, started rebuilding those bad modules, using parts of one or two to fix another. Got pretty good with a soldering iron! The Captain doesn't want to hear, "Sorry sir, gonna be a couple weeks to get new parts in!" When I had come on board, all seven radios were in pieces from the last deployment. When we got back, only one radio was down, because even my good components ran out. Captain gave me a Letter of Recommendation". Whoopee.
But no good deed goes unpunished. The ship's office computer, an old Lexitron, had broken, and the spare card had a broken component! Prior ET hadn't gotten it replaced! So I pulled the component from one board to fix it. Got the computer up and running. XO also doesn't want excuses! I made the mistake of reporting the repair to the depot when shipping the bad cards back. THEY wrote me up for "unauthorised depot level repair"! Sheesh.