![]() It turns out that clear writing skills are not a requirement at OET (the FCC office that handles our cases). Their responses are always cryptic at best and always remind me of (getting to your point) the incredibly ambiguous answers always provided by the Oracle at Delphi. We use an FCC service called the KDB – Knowledge Data Base – to send rules queries directly to the FCC for perusal and subsequent opinion. ![]() Those regulations are fairly well defined but in 20+ years of doing this we always manage to find subtle points of confusion in the interpretation of those rules. My company designs wireless devices that use the FCC’s unlicensed Part 15 rules. The image of Tantalus comes to mind many days but I have an even better Classical example to offer from my work. This is just how some programs go.Įnjoyed this one. Another year later, they were calling the program “Tombstone,” recalling images of death. After it had gone on for a couple of years, engineers started to call it “Millstone,” a reference to a bible verse about a man thrown in the water with a millstone around his neck ( Luke 17-2). I can illustrate this point by recalling a large program at HP that had the code name “ Touchstone,” a metaphor for a product that will set a new standard for the industry. Sisyphus has come to be a metaphor for any pointless activity that goes on forever. Unfortunately, many engineering projects have a phase where they seem interminable. Just as the boulder was to reach the top of the hill, it would somehow find a way to roll all the way down to the bottom of the hill, and Sisyphus would be forced to repeat his labor. The other Greek myth that comes up often is that of Sisyphus (Figure 2), who was a very clever king who was cursed by Zeus for his cleverness by making him endlessly roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. I can only do so much …įigure 2: Artist’s Imagining of Sisyphus. The most irritating response I have received after warning someone about a risk that was realized is that I should have been more vehement in stopping them. I often refer to these engineers as “Cassandras.” All I can tell these frustrated souls is that their obligation is to warn their coworker, but that ultimately the coworker owns their decisions. ![]() I frequently have engineers tell me that they had warned someone about some hazard, but their warning went unheeded and the worst occurred. They seem particularly appropriate to modern management.Ĭassandra (Figure 1) was a princess who was given the power of prophesy by Apollo, but when she spurned his advances, he inflicted a curse upon her where no one would believe her. The last two weeks I have mentioned two Greek myths several times – the tales of Cassandra and Sisyphus. It may seem odd, but the more time I spend in engineering management, the more relevant these myths seem to become. I still have a personal copy of this book that I refer to occasionally. Later in school, I read about Greek mythology from a book called Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton. As a boy, I read a children’s version of Aesop’s fables, which I loved and are still relevant to daily life. The older I get, the more I see the relevance of the classics to modern life. Figure 1: Artist’s Imagining of Cassandra.
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