One story that sticks with me about my DoD project days is about a division manager named Bill Wagner. I would describe Bill as evangelical, religiously so. This struck a wierd cord since we were in a military project. It is said that your observations of someone can never capture his true nature because your observations taint what you see. I know though that Bill  was a Vietnam veteran. I can only imagine the skills of manipulation and ability to cut through bullshit to get what you want that are forged by the fire of being in a war.

For sure, he had a fire in his belly even if he wasn't an expert programmer. Back then, I as a young programmer thought programming was all that mattered.

Anyway, we were working on a piece of code that would be used to provide logistics information about military equipment parts. We were way over schedule waiting for other pieces of code to complete that we were relying on. Bill proceded to put on a play about how two soldiers might go about using our code. He talked about one miltiary person on base making a call to a central systems center. The call would be to an operator who would try to use our system to locate parts for repairing a piece of equipment.

To this day, this little play is a part of me. Whenever I build a system, I fill it with my imagination of how someone would use it. I try to see it coming to life and do not let any kind of bullshit get in my way. It's hard sometimes because people throw a lot of bs into the works wherever you go.