I joined Notron as a senior project engineer, and waded into a nest of snakes.The place was in constant chaos. The problem was Jeff Hotpants, the playboy president of Notron. He was preoccupied applying his amateur psychiatry to sexy women rather than to urgent business at hand. He believed in pleasure before work, but even in Santa Barbara the world didn't run that way, particularly when creditors and customers were angry at the company. They finally got Jeff's attention, and he ordered me to get a second mini-plant going to manufacture a mysterious testing machine which was supposed to tear apart material samples at the unprecedented speed of 50,000inches/inch/sec. This was an area of mechanical engineering I had zero knowledge about....

My Continuous Learning Process

To Americanize (update) my education I took various courses at the Santa Barbara City College. One of them was entitled, "An overview of algebra." That course overwhelmed me with the "new math", and I could not believe that the American educational system had come up with such an idiotic mathematical system.....

I realized now that the school system here was not a system were one was supposed to learn and memorize facts, mathematical or otherwise. In my opinion it was an extended kindergarten, where sociological interaction was more important than knowledge. Wow, that verified my judgement of the general education level of the population.