u/bwade913

In the 80's I worked at an EDA company (Electronic Design Automation) where I specialized in the application tools that did place and route for printed circuit boards. As a headquarters  applications engineer my day to day job was handling tech support cases for both customers and field applications engineers. 

The company I worked for was having trouble hiring people into my role with a strong technical background and decided to experiment with training bright non-technical folks enough to handle some of the easier cases.

We had hired one such person to handle PC configuration cases. This was in the days before "plug and play" hardware, where you had to manually configure port usage for any hardware used by the application. The new hire excelled in that role of handling PC configuration cases, so my manager decided to see if they could start handling application tool issues as well.

EDA tools for printed circuit tool design aren't terribly complicated. I had an engineering degree, but anyone with an electronics technician level of understanding could probably handle the job well and we were hoping we could train our seemingly bright new hire into handling that role. So they were sent to a training class on the application tools and as tech lead for the tool support group, I was tasked with answering any questions they had about the tools outside the training.

So one day they came to my cube and asked me to explain something about "vias". This surprised me a bit because vias are a fairly simple concept. A hole is drilled in the PCB and then metal plated so that it makes electrical  contact with any printed wire traces that touch the same X-Y coordinates on various layers of the PCB. It's how an electrical connection moves from one layer to another.

So I bring up a PCB design on the workstation on my desk and start to explain this, and as I discuss the topic with the NH, it becomes apparent that they not only don't understand how a via works, they also don't understand how a wire works. So I take a step back and start to explain what a wire's role is in an electronic circuit. You have a driver and one or more loads and the wire by virtue of its conductivity passes the signal from the driver to the loads. and the various signal paths can't touch each other or the signals would get crossed. They're not getting it.

So next I decide to use an analogy to something more familiar to them. I explain that it's just like plumbing. You have a hot water source (driver) and a cold water source and they each use separate pipes (wires) to reach their respective loads and those pipes can't intersect each other just like wires can't. But it turns out that the NH doesn't understand plumbing any better than they understand electronics.

At that point I'm getting flustered and I tried to figure out how how to make this even easier to understand. I decide the wires are now hallways in a building, and the vias are stairways between hallways on different floors and there are multiple sets of hallways that people can use without ever running into the people in the other sets of hallways. For some reason that didn't work either.

At that point I had to explain that this wasn't going to work out because it gets a lot more complicated than this. My co-worker went back to their PC configuration role. We had previously had a good relationship, but they held a grudge against me until the day they were laid off, possibly longer, because I couldn't properly explain wires to them.

Years ago when I was very active in bicycle racing, I got involved in some incidents with the most entitled and delusional person I've ever encountered and I thought I'd share the story here.

Bike racing is an inherently dangerous sport and so there are rules and regulations in place to regulate dangerous behavior. When you first get a racing license, you start in the beginner category and work your way up though the system, not just by obtaining good race results, but also by having other riders vouch for your safe technical ability. Dangerous riders are subject to relegation or disqualification in races or even a license suspension for serious cases.

I was racing in a category for experienced racers over the age of 35 in Colorado, a fast but definitely non-elite category for people who raced as a hobby on weekends, but had full time jobs and families to attend to the rest of the week. Most of the races are criteriums which involve a lot of high speed cornering and position battles leading to an eventual sprint finish. There's usually a race being held somewhere around the state during the warm months, but most of them are in the Front Range communities, Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, etc.

So a guy starts showing up at races periodically that few people know. He's from Summit County in the mountains, so doesn't get down to the Front Range races regularly but does now and then. When he does, he races very aggressively, and has a habit of "dive bombing" corners rushing up the inside of the peloton approaching a high speed corner gambling that there will be room for him in the apex of the turn when he gets there. Then he tends to lose his position and repeat the sketchy maneuver throughout the race. If anyone asks him to tone down the risky moves, he reacts angrily, says he's been told by top riders that he's a good aggressive rider and that the rest of us don't know how to race. That's kind of nuts because he doesn't get very good results and says this to people that are doing much better. The only reputation he's earned is that he's a sketchy rider (SR) and there'd been multiple complaints to officials.

So one day we're racing the state criterium championships in Longmont and SR is still dive bombing corners throughout the race when he caused a crash that took down five or six riders. One of the top riders in the race broke his shoulder and was out the rest of the season. I narrowly avoided the pileup and went on to win the race. Afterwards, someone mentioned that a protest had been filed and that I should go tell the officials what I had seen. I do that and the SR is there talking to the head official who I know well. I tell the official what I'd seen of the crash and also about the ongoing issues with SR's dangerous riding. SR goes into his spiel about how he's the one who knows how to race and we don't. He's saying this to me, the guy who just won the race after he crashed out. He was given a three month license suspension IIRC.

Fast forward a couple of years and SR is still dive bombing corners and he causes another pileup. I avoided the pileup but heard afterwards that a fist fight broke out. The same official is in charge at the race and he moves to impose a harsher suspension, maybe a year, I'm not sure.

SR decides to appeal the suspension and so a disciplinary meeting is set up on a weekend afternoon to hear the appeal. I was asked to attend as a witness to both accidents, and SR's general behavior. The thing is that between the two incidents the state cycling association (BRAC) had seceded from the national governing body (USCF now USA Cycling) and had started its own governing body called the American Cycling Association over political differences. The USCF wanted to replace the people officiating racing in CO with new folks more politically aligned. BRAC had seceded to maintain the status quo. So the organization name had changed, but it was all the same people involved. The same District Rep, the same cycling official, the same BoD,  and the same witnesses including me. All volunteers giving up a weekend afternoon to deal with this jackass.

SR shows up to the disciplinary meeting with a teammate who came to act as his council and argue his case. I don't know if he was a lawyer IRL but he was acting the part. Their defense is that SR is just a good aggressive rider and nobody properly appreciates that. Then they drop the bombshell claim that the previous USCF suspension never happened and can't be taken into account for this new ACA suspension. The council actually said that unless documentation of the USCF suspension could be presented, it couldn't be taken into account. The ruling was, no we were all there and we remember you. We don't need no stinkin' documentation. You're suspended.

I think the guy was so self centered that he never bothered to figure out who anyone else was or what they were doing.

I was selling a bicycle on Marketplace and received an inquiry from a name I immediately recognized. I also recognized their very distinctive writing  style. There was no capitalization and every sentence included one or two ellipsis (...) which I suppose is meant to indicate a pause in the phrasing of their thoughts. I've never known anyone else to communicate that way.

We'd been cycling teammates for several years, shared dozens of training rides and races. We weren't close friends but knew each other well enough to burn music CDs for each other. We were even Facebook friends.

But he didn't remember me. We went back and forth a few times. It finally clicked when I mentioned the name of the cycling team. I was the team president and road captain so he should have remembered me even if it had been over ten years. Once it clicked, we caught up with each other. I told him he was much taller than me and there was no way the bike was a good fit, and that was the end of that. I'd always thought of that guy as a high functioning stoner.