"In hindsight, perhaps I should have given him a freebie, as he did almost unheard of $6 million in sales of custom PCs that first year."
My older brother was one of the first classes raised on early personal computers. He invested in Dell because, he reasoned, they were really just a box maker, and their box was superior. After splits and splits and splits, his average price per share was 25 cents. He sold for $65. Some of his other early investments were Microsoft and Oracle. He thought these "computer things" were here to stay! (Full disclosure: he also bought and recommended RedHat, which was at $125, and soared all the way up to...three bucks!)
Cool story: He was on the Dean's List in engineering at Purdue, when McDonnell Douglas tapped him on the shoulder for re-entry work on the current Apollo project. They assigned he and five others the task, and said they expected it to take 4-6 months to complete.
My brother went to the supervisor with an idea: he thought he could write a computer program with an equation which would solve the problem in three days. His supervisor leaned in to him, looked him squarely in the eye, and said "Son, around here, we use a slide rule. Now get to work."
He worked on it for a few days, and then went back to the supervisor, more convinced than ever. "All right," the guy finally said, "you've got three days." Three days later, he returned with an enormous stack of cards. His fellow engineers were stunned. "The kid did this in three days?!?" they asked. "No...he did it in two days. On the third day he checked his math."
The supervisor then tore off the top third, and handed the cards to a team of two. "Check his math". Same with the other pair of teams. Two months later, without finding a single error, they called off the search.
So, no men in women's prisons.
#9 | Posted by BellRinger
Which prison should you be in?