When I graduated from university, back in 1972, the only job I found was in the defence industry, where I was offered a job because the US government paid them $20,000 to hire me, a STEM graduate.
My first day on the job, my new boss told me, “We don’t need any T or E, we need S and M, and I mean Sales and Marketing. Your quota is $250,000 a year. Meet your quota, your commission is 20%. If you don’t meet your quota, you’ll be fired. Now where are you going to sell $250,000?”
I told him I had no idea.
“You should resign today. If you don’t, you’ll just waste your time and ours.”
But I had read my contract. If I quit, I had to repay the US government the $20,000 they’d paid the company to hire me (and if they laid me off, they had to repay the $20,000). And I didn’t have the $20,000, so I did not quit. For a year, they gave me jobs like digging holes and filling them up again, anything to convince me to quit and pay the $20,000 so they could keep the $20,000 and offer the job to someone who might be a great salesperson, but, tightwad that I am, I dug those holes and filled them up. The small draw they had to pay me against future commissions wasn’t great, but getting a small salary was better than having to pay $20,000. Cold, hard cash. And then being out of a job because I had quit, and so was not entitled to any unemployment insurance payments.
During that year, I saw a classmate who knew what to do. His degree was in Organic Chemistry, and his final paper was “Studies in the synthesis of …” In Organic Chemistry, if you succeed in synthesising something, your final paper is, “Synthesis of …”, but if you fail, your final paper is “Studies in the synthesis of …”, so he’d failed to synthesise whatever organic compound he’d been trying to synthesise. They asked him, “What do you know about weapons grade lasers?”
He answered, “My real degree is in weapons grade lasers, and I worked on a project at the Balcones Research Center, but my project is classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR, so I can’t tell you anything about it. They put Organic Chemistry as the fake name of my degree, since my real degree is Top Secret, but I am one of the world’s greatest experts in laser weapons.” They said, “You’re our boy!” and for a year, he went with the team of salespersons and came back with several pots of money, then the team fought over who did how much to get the several million or so dollars that they got and who was entitled to how much of the commission.
The actual contract employed a bunch of $5 an hour people punching computer cards for $100 a card. The code did not compile or run, but the team promised that the code solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons. Then the team and the contracting officer had to go tell the senior officers, the bosses of the contracting officer, that the code solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons (the contracting officer wanted to keep his job, so, if he knew that the code did not compile or run, he lied to his superior officers, but usually, the contracting officer was careful not to look so he didn’t have to lie, he could truthfully say that he had watched hours and hours of presentations by the salesmen with STEM degrees who promised him that the code—which did not compile or run—solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons). Then the senior officers overseeing the project, who had absolutely no physics background, listened to a bunch of big words that sounded sciencey and were convinced that the presenters knew what they were talking about and were telling the truth that they had developed code that solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of weapons grade lasers.
I was fired as soon as my year was up and my company could fire me without having to return 1¢ of the $20,000 they’d gotten for hiring me, since I was $249,500 short of my $250,000 quota, but at least I could collect unemployment insurance, and, after a month paid for by unemployment insurance, I was hired by another company that was paid $22,000 to hire a STEM graduate (the price went up every year with inflation, which was obviously 10% that year). And a few months later, my classmate applied for a job with my new company.
“We’re doing research in particle beam weapons,” they told him.
“My real degree is in particle beam weapons,” he said, “and I worked on a project at the Balcones Research Center, but my project is classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR, so I can’t tell you anything about it. They put Organic Chemistry as the fake name of my degree, since my real degree is Top Secret. I had to work on lasers for the last year because I couldn’t find a job in particle beam weapons, but it will be great to get back to working on what I am one of the world’s greatest experts in.” And, once again, they said, “You’re our boy!”
The executives of the defence companies earn huge sums for doing stuff that has absolutely no value of any kind, which (I guess) is better than doing stuff that kills people (but they still manage to produce some WWII era weapons that can kill people in Third World countries while getting paid to produce WWIV era ultra-advanced weapons suitable for defence against an invasion by extra-terrestrial warmongering aliens).
Net: The Ukrainians, fighting a proxy war by NATO with NATO weapons against Russia are losing, and losing badly, while all the Western media are required by law to write that the Ukrainians, with ultra-advanced NATO weapons, have completely destroyed the Russian invasion force which, because of the sanctions, only have outmoded and inept Soviet and Czarist weapons.
Or, to put it another way, lies, lies, and more lies by the West and all the Western media.
No comments:
Post a Comment