Originally posted by Seitse
Sure, pass me the Amazon link to your memoirs and I'll happily purchase
a copy. Then I'll read it and, afterwards, compare it with mine. Deal?
Even better, I'll double down here: I will write on RHP, on a crispy, new
thread, an honest and professional synopsis of your memoirs. Are you
in or will you chicken out?
You CAN"T TAKE THE TRUTH🙂
Just a joke from that movie.
I have had a long and at least in my own head, illustrious, career, not so much as the important positions I have had but the places I have worked, on Ion Implanters for 20 years at Varian, who sold of the implanter division which required me to shift gears but like I said, before that I was at Goddard on Apollo tracking and timing, an incredible job, just a lowly tech but you can bet your boots I was in techie heaven. Before that at CDC computers, before that a stint for a couple years at Tesco, company fixing and installing traffic lights, a nice shytty story with that one, before that on Andros Island at a secret, not so secret now, British submarine base called Autec, again just a lowly technician but benefits were unbelievable, like the time I could spend listening to the underwater microphones (hydrophones) which were laid out by the hundreds up and down TOTO, Tongue of the ocean, an underwater canyon 8000 feet deep and over 100 miles long by about 30 wide, phones there to pick up pingers on any underwater craft so they could track them, torpedo's, subs and the like, in 3D, not bad technology for 1968. What was incredibly fun was after hours, I had the control board to myself, could switch any one of hundreds of hydrophones 8000 feet underwater to an amp and speaker and could listen to the incredible another world sounds coming from the dophins, porps and whales and such, sounding like a sci fi other world sound track. Fantastic to remember even today.
Before that 4 years in USAF, B47 bomb nav, and airborne radar. I didn't know till I heard a track by George Carlin, who had the exact same job as me in the AF but 5 or so years earlier, he said our squadron was an elite where they had chosen the highest incoming scores of the AF tests at the time. I scored very high and got in, never knowing, only in the back of my head I was in with a bunch of REALLY smart guys and I did my thing there too, I invented a sound synthesizer but did not even imaging putting on a keyboard, but that device made the most outrageous sci fi sounding sounds, I didn't know how powerful a machine I had invented and considered it a toy which we used at my haven the University of Nebraska, I was stationed a an AF base no longer there, but we had fun with that box, like the night a few of us planted the box (it had flashing lights and made outrageous sounds) in a bush just before the girls had to go back to their dorms at 10 PM. So one of the campus cops comes up and is looking at it and started pulling it out of the bushes, we jump out of the car and told him it was a joke to play on the coeds, so he said, wait here, I'm getting my buddy. So he comes back and in this serious tone of voice, we think there's some kind of bomb, we have to be careful, of course knowing all along it was a noise maker. So the buddy sticks his foot gingerly into the bush poking at it with the toe of his boot and everyone starts laughing including the first campus cop. A good time was had by all🙂
So I had built various versions of that box, one where all the parts were dangling in a big spaghetti like fashion, carefully putting scotch tape over wires that would touch and the whole device was designed around an old transistor radio, long story, but it was all inside that insane pile of parts including a 90 volt tiny battery. My roomie comes in, looks at it, shakes his head, going Donald, Donald, Donald!
I just wish I knew what I had, was too naive to understand the depth of what I developed. It is funny my own daughter 25 years later got her first music degree at Berklee music college in Boston, in synthesizer sound design, and MA at Welseyan in composition. I MIGHT be a teenie biased but I am very proud of that.
If you think I am just BSing you, I can give you my soundcloud account where I have 51 recent tracks there, a lot of them my own compositions on guitar, mandolin, keyboard and lap dulcimer. But I doubt if you are curious enough to even wonder if I am telling the truth or just building up my flagging ego.
So here I am, 75 Yo, still working full time in a very high tech field indeed, working for 2 Phd process engineers as the go to guy for my observational skills they miss when something weird happens to the plasma in the vacuum system with an argon background activated to plasma by a 1500 watt RF transmitter where all that power starts a plasma that strikes a 'target' which could be aluminum, silicon carbide, Chrome, silicon dioxide and others coming up. You probably don't understand what I am talking about but I am close to 90K a year at that job and have been there, Gulton is the name of the company, been there 6 years with a 160 mile round trip commute every day to get there and was in fact at another company one block away from that from 2001 to about 2010. On 9 11, I had just repaired my amateur radio gear, in running order and I drove to Manhattan surprised they let an old fart like me in town but ended up at Red Cross headquarters there where I spent 24 hours which went by a lot faster than I thought, fixing radios, fixing computers and one printer of a really nice FBI agent, didn't know there was such a thing before that night, and delivering coffee, doing dispatch of messages to the REAL hero's on the ground getting data on which school used as shelter, needed blankets, food, pillows and the like, getting those messages to the drivers who loaded up stuff in trucks to the sites in need.
Anyway, that is a fifty centavo tour of my life, I suppose you will just come back with more BS about me lying but that is your choice and I have told you only part of what I did in my 75 years, for instance being the student of Howard Brubeck, brother of the jazz genius Dave Brubeck at Palomar College in San Marcos California WAY back in time. Was in love with Howard's incredibly beautiful daughter Ginger, we had classes together, I found out she signed up for badminton and naturally I had to sign up too so I could be close to her, and actually won my college badminton championship, going up to pick up my trophy, which was about 5 inches high, while the football and baseball champs had these things weighing in at 20 kilos it seemed like. Never did get the girl, she was like royalty to me, afraid, stupidly to ask her out, I mean the daughter of my piano teacher, Howard Brubeck, who now has an auditorium named for him, he died in '93. I tried finding Ginger much later but she may be dead now, or married with a whole family behind her and another Jewish last name. Sigh. She was beautiful in 1959.
So that's part of my life and there is a lot more but later depending on if you are actually interested or just baiting me for more pejoratives later. Good luck if that is your aim. I have a thick skin and young punks like you effect me not at all.