Grandpa Stories – Air Ducks

My grandfather on my dad’s side was a mechanical engineer for several companies, including Coors (he designed and built some of the vats here in the Colorado location AND patented a crane arm in the process). He warned me about something when I was a kid, and said that I would be “doomed to re-Americanize outsourced stuff”. At the time, I believe I was 16 or 17 and seriously considering a career in IT (which, hey life goal checked off, looks like it was a pretty good choice). I will always remember the conversation, not because I find it rings true every joking day of my current career, but because I thought he was on crack at the time.

“You know I work sometimes, right? A garden like mine isn’t cheap to grow [my grandfather loves gardening]. I got a set of plans in for [generic I'm sure I wasn't supposed to know about this building] from the cheapo’s in Manhattan. You know what my job is? Redoing the plans for these guys because they pay some guy with a PC to build my plans and then I fix them. It’s kinda like having an intern. Except he’s better at math than me, but can’t speak English worth a crap, and has no common sense. So they hire me to clean up the plans. Normally it’s calculating load – boring stuff like that – but not the other day. The other day I’m looking at some plans and nearly fall over laughing. I was going over the AC plans for the building and came across the plans labeled “Air Ducks”. Air ducks! What hilarity! I don’t know why I thought it was so funny. Actually it got not so funny because every DUCT was labeled Duck and I had to change it.

But that’s what I get paid for now. Proofreading. You’re going to end up doing stuff like that too, especially in techie gee whiz stuff. Half that junk gets made in Asia [this is in the 90's, yes, I know it's like 95% now..] and it’s so poorly documented I think about hiring someone to translate for me so I can translate for them.”

Grandpa Jim didn’t have too many “old man rants”. Come to think of it, none of my grandpa’s did. But they would have enough to put the hesitency in the back of my head about what they were saying. I was 17 at all, a year away from being 18 and knowing everything. I just thought it would be ludicrous that we would take stuff from the US and move it internationally. Now I deal with it every day “Oh, we’re waiting to hear back from Engineering in China”. Or who could forget “Thanks for calling in to HP today. My name is Simon Mandipidipal”.