VICTOREEN

In 1968, after eight years in Uncle Sam's Canoe Club, I was a civilian again, back in Cleveland  and I needed a job. 

A head hunter sent me to a job interview at a company called Victereen Instruments in Cleveland. At the interview, I was screened by by a man named Andy the vice president of engineering.  Andy said that they were getting a flood of Vietnam veterans looking for work and they were obliged to interview them all but not to get my hopes up  too much. He had a simple practical test for me. He had a Techtronix oscilloscope hooked up to a circuit and asked me what the time delay was on a pulse. What he didn't know and what I didn't think of putting on my resume was that I was sent to a three course at the Techtronix factory in Beaverton Oregon. For three weeks, eight hours a day, we learned all about the workings of a Techtronix scope. We toured the production floor and even saw how the scopes were reconditioned. Andy wanted me to tell him what the time delay was on the pulse. 

I told Andy that he thought that the time delay was 4 microseconds but the scope's triggering was set up wrong. That the time delay was more like 3.5 microseconds. He asked me what was wrong and I told him that he didn't account for the delay line on the vertical deflection plates. "What delay line?" he asked. I explained that the good folks at Techtronix put a 0.5 microsecond delay on the vertical plates in order to view the leading edge on the pulses being viewed. 

I asked him if he wanted me to adjust the pulse width to 4 useconds and he said yes. He showed me which potentiometer adjusted the pulse width and I set up the scope to trigger properly. I adjusted the pot to 4 useconds and immediately the Teletype machine started chattering away. Teletype TT33s were about the only digital printers available back in the Stone Age. Andy about crapped his pants. He said it took his guys four or five hours to set up the printers at the plant. 

I was hired on the spot into the engineering department. Victoreen made radiation analyzing equipment and the work was interesting but Andy was, dare I say, an asshole. After about fifteen months at Victoreen some technician lit a cigarette in the lab. Yes everyone smoked everywhere back then and tossed his match into a pan with solvent in it. Woosh, the pan turned into Vesuvius. Without a second thought, I grabbed a small fire extinguisher off of the wall and put out the fire. The next thing I knew, Andy was screaming in my face that I "Expended a perfectly good fire extinguisher". 

"Would you rather have had the plant burned to the ground?" I countered.  

A half an hour without any fanfare, Andy handed me a severance check and I was free. This was on a Thursday and we drove up to Dearborn Heights in Michigan to visit with my in laws. On Monday, I was back in Cleveland and interviewed at API instruments. I found out at the interview that the chief engineer at Victoreen and the chief engineer at API were good friends and the had talked about me. I got up to leave and was asked where I was going. I thought that after their talk that I was not going to be hired. Steve my soon to be my new boss told  me he was told that I could be a pain in the ass at times but was worth hiring. He added that his friend also told him that Andy was an asshole and was hired.