Thinking aloud

Secret Services - 1 June 20, 2006

This is intended to be first one in a series of posts (in no
particular order) explaining the various forms of secrets
that I can’t stand. Beginning with today evening’s event.

You can easily skip the technical parts (if any) and try to
get a general idea about what i want to say.

One
of our seniors had got one project from
one
other senior who had got this from some
one
else. So, he thought it will be a better idea to give the
project to
one
of the juniors as he was anyways leaving for job soon. So,
he called me up saying something like “I have got some
project, which I think you will like to do,come to my home”.
And he refused to tell me anything more than that on phone.
On reaching his home he showed me one circuit (about which
he knew almost nothing at that time) and said that “we” are
required to make an electro-magnet that can lift 10-15 kgs
and the circuit was
supposed to drive that. I had no knowledge of
electro-magnets so i asked
one of my friends in Electrical to join me. Now today
we finally had the meeting the
original guy.

So, it was me, my friend, two of our seniors and this
40-something guy with one younger fella (who looked like his
son) sitting at my senior’s home. And from the first sight
the person looked a complete fake to me. Here are few of the
reasons:

He said he had done engineering (from some branch
like food processing) and electronics was his hobby, yet
he had no idea
what-so-ever about MOSFETs, oscillators, filters,
temperature sensing, driver circuits etc.etc. Okey I
agree that he may not have deep knowledge but don’t tell
me that electronics is your hobby (that too at 40-50
years of age) you haven’t even heard about
ANY of these
things.
He had got the circuit (which my senior had shown me
earlier) yet he had
absolutely no idea how it worked.
He never told us
what exactly he want to do with this thing (just
that he want to pick a load of 10-15 kgs, without giving
any clue about what load or why).
He repeated the same
thing again and again even when we asked anything
else (that is some more details).
He said he had
working electro-magnets but didn’t reply (and changed
topic) when my senior said that we will like to have a
look at them.
He could not reply
why he want to use electromagnets only and why
not something else like motors.
He never told us why
he wants us to do this thing (when he can get it
done much faster and easily from some professional)
He didn’t look and sound an iota like an engineer!!

In short, I was feeling uneasy because,
first he was not
telling us all the details that we wanted to know.
Secondly he was
trying to show that he knows a lot about such things (while
it was clear that he didn’t).
Thirdly, I could not
think of any reason why he had chosen us for this because it
had no value what-so-ever from research (or academic) point
of view and willl be very difficult for us to do (due to
lack of tools and experaince) while it is very easy to be
done by any professional person working in this field and
Finally I really
believe that from what he told us, elctro-magnet was not the
right thing to use for this purpose (yet he was not ready to
listen to anything other than this).

So, either he was hiding something or otherwise he had no
idea about what he wanted to do. In any case I will like to
stay away from this thing. I just wanted to blast away the
guy with my questions (and serious doubts about his
integrity) and show him his true value but the effect of
sitting in my senior’s home( and his speaking sooooo
respectfully to the person) made me change my mind. And now
its just a question of when (and not if) I will say goodbye
to this ” fake project“.

5 Comments:

Anonymous said…

hmmm….you are perfectly correct
in sayin all this stuff….and i am not in doubt abt his
integrity…tho abt his prok!!!

6:27 PM, June 21, 2006

Sirius Black said…

lolz seems like sm undercover agent
or a Terrorist in the makin askin u for this project

3:39 AM, June 22, 2006

The_Girl_From_Ipanema said…

pakka feku hai.

btw, i know EVERYTHING about MOSFETs, oscillators, filters,
temperature sensing, driver circuits. and it’s not even my
hobby. just ask me whatever you want.