wow:

This is about the closest I cam come at 6 in the AM. Some years ago I was working for US Air Force, which means you occasionally have to put up with officers who rotate in for two or three years, trying so desperately to make a mark during their limited tenure. I've come to think that the tenure is limited on purpose simply to keep some of these people from making not a mark but an indelible stain.

Combat units are different. People there are willing and able. It's in the support troops that you get the officious idiots who would be dead in 11 seconds in combat (I'm in the military pay arena, which is definitely not a combat area.)

Anyway, I suddenly had this boss (a major) who had, earlier in his career, somehow garnered one of the real plum awards for career AF officers, the Lance Sijan award. How he got it is a mystery, because this man was truly a numb-nuts. It took him more than a year to figure out that he couldn't figure out what we did, how we did it, or why, and that he was viewed as less than adequate, to say the least. So he called all of his people in and told them, "I am a member of the military, the military uniform demands respect, therefore I order you to respect me." The chorus of "Sieg heil" was almost deafening.

ANYWAY! What does that have to do with cryptography. This guy, as I said, wasn't bright, nor was he very well educated. He once had to do a briefing of some kind that he should have had the sense to leave to the professionals who knew what the hell they were doing, but he insisted on giving it himself. He called me up and said, "Ted, I have to give this briefing, would you put together some slides with cryptic comments on them so I can show them what's going on here."

I was of course unable to resist the temptation. Had I been really cruel I would have delivered the slides to him three minutes before his briefing and then laughed silently as he projected them on the board. The very last slide had on it "CRYPTIC" followed by the dictionary definition. By the way, this man was not an AF Academy graduate, he was actually a mustang, one who became an officer after having been enlisted. Usually, those were the most palatable, but this particular one was an obnoxious jerk. The AF Academy graduates are very bright, very career-oriented, and in the main very much anti-civilian employee. But you know where they're coming from so they're pretty easy to deal with.

TEd


TEd