So in other words, she hung tough and got what she wanted. The gas-blowing of “colleagues” and “officials” are meaningless exhalations.

****

I was trying to design a fixture a few months ago, and the stress analysts were insisting on a lot of pointless reinforcement.

I kicked it up to my boss, who agreed that the reinforcement was needless (and in fact useless.) He called them into his office and spent ten minutes ranting about excessive conservatism and how they weren’t giving us the benefit of experience and how they were all totally wrong. He capped off the rant by telling me to do everything that they wanted “just to keep this moving”.

Two weeks after that I designed another fixture. They insisted on a lot of pointless reinforcement, because they knew that no matter how loud he cried, he’d knuckle under rather than go to the mattresses.