A couple of weeks after I started working at Nevis, I met Ken, the Cognizant Engineer of the project. Eventually it was explained to me that NASA has a "Cognizant Engineer" on every project, and that was the best explanation I could get. Todd and Ken both live in California, and they rotated being onsite at Nevis, with Todd staying two weeks and Ken staying one.
I liked Ken right away. It is my impression that he is uncomfortable initially in social situations, but he can be the life of the party once he relaxes. He is smart and interesting. He was kind of the worrywart of the project, always afraid that something might go wrong. That was a little funny sometimes, but he made many improvements to ensure that nothing *would* go wrong. I always looked forward to his being there, and not just because it meant that Todd wouldn't be there.
Todd and I both tried to establish a professional relationship. I was still hoping that the initial flareup was an aberration. I bought two musical DVDs from Amazon that I planned to give him when the times were right and I was as friendly as I could be under the circumstances. Things seemed to be getting better, but that didn't last long.
We had started building FM1, the first flight module, about a week before. To add strength, the spacers for the first five layers are a bit chunkier - 1.6 mm x 1.5 mm (0.1 mm = 0.004"). The regular spacers are 1.5 mm x 1.2 mm. When picking up a regular spacer, it is rather easy to see which side is wider, but for the 1.6 mm x 1.5 mm spacers the procedure was to measure each one with calipers before inserting it in a strongback. That's what I did, but I soon realized that I could see which was the wide side by rotating it in my fingers. That amazed me, because my eyesight is hardly what it used to be, but I was wearing 2.0x reading glasses and the transition between the long and short sides was not especially difficult to see. I began to choose the long side visually, then check with the calipers. After I'd correctly oriented about 100 spacers without making a mistake, I announced that I could do it visually and didn't need to use the calipers. That didn't go over well, because no-one believed that I could do it, but I was allowed to continue without the calipers. Todd and Tom and Iliya all warned me that there had been problems in the past with visual alignment, but I thought it was cool that I, who has increasingly become Mr. Magoo with the passage of time, could do it.
That all blew up in a spectacular way. The morning of August 11 I checked my email when I got to the lab and found a message that Todd had sent the night before. He said: "Tom and Illiya had some problems while laying glass due to the spacers not installed properly. Two of them fell out of the shoes as Tom was loading them. They had already been epoxied and it makes quite a mess on the glass not to mention the loss in spacers and time to clean it up. After those two were discovered, they went and measured the orientation of the remaining spacers and found 5 more that were not properly oriented. Tom mentioned that he has to measure them to orient them properly where you didn't think you needed to. For 1.2 mm spacers, from this point forward use calipers and find the correct orientation during installation. Tom and Illiya will check the orientation before laying epoxy." [Notes: Todd always spelled Iliya's name with two L's, for some reason. Also, he probably meant 1.6 mm spacers, not 1.2 mm.]
I was willing to accept that I might have made one mistake, but I knew there was no way I'd made seven. I responded: "With all due respect, that's BS. It is easy for me to see which way the spacers go in, and I've double-checked 50 times and never been wrong. Nevertheless, I'll use the calipers... This would be a good time for you to find someone else for this job, if you don't think I can do it."
It had been one thing after another and I was really upset. When I finished work I went home and pondered what possibly could have gone wrong. Suddenly I had an "OOPS" moment. I sent an email to Todd asking, "1.6 mm is the height of the spacers, right?" He wrote back and said that the height of all the spacers is 1.5 mm, that 1.6 mm is the width. That was the only thing I'd been able to come up with, and, unfortunately, it was true: I'd inserted *all* of the 1.6 mm spacers incorrectly. As well as I can remember, no-one had ever actually told me which way they go in, and I'd made an incorrect assumption.
At that point I received a phone call saying that my father had died. I was pretty much a mess. Thinking that it would be hard for them to fire me on the day my dad died, I took advantage of the sad situation and zipped an email back to Todd angrily saying that obviously there had been a training problem.
That was probably the low point of my time at Nevis, but things didn't get a whole lot better.
wow, what a hard time for you!
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