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Wayback Wednesday: He’s excellent at worst-case scenarios

Flashback to 1994: This pilot fish works from an organization that does military tasks, and his program supervisor comes home from an IT meeting with a nifty brand new gadget.

“It’s a factor that punches the hole in the part of the double-density floppy disk so that you can structure it since high-density,” says seafood. “The program supervisor crows about how exactly much money we are able to save deploying it — about 10 cents per disk — and can make a big display at the quarterly evaluation for the executive VP.

“We casually ask if he understands the difference in the way the disks are manufactured, utilizing the analogy regarding raking sand versus raking gravel. He snarkily replies that it doesn’t matter as the price benefits outweigh that.

“THEREFORE I ask if he could be willing to danger storing the mission-critical software program we have been developing for the army upon a bootleg formatted disk to save lots of 10 cents. VP asks me what the worst-case scenario is.

“I simply tell him, ‘Most severe case is a couple of soldiers standing before a launcher with a display screen saying, “Disk not formatted,” while enemy missiles rain lower around them.’

“The disk punch was quietly consigned to the provide room.”

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