Can it get worse than this story?

[Arde]

An electrical engineering student that was roughly a year ahead of me designed a DC power supply as his graduation project, submitted design specs, like voltage, current, ripple, etc and of course his proposed design to meet the specs in the form of schematics. He had to build a prototype which he submitted packaged as a complete box, as neat as a DQ project, and the prototype passed testing in the lab with flying colors. Pure reliable DC. The student got his diploma and moved on to a job elsewhere, who knows where. The power supply stayed of course in the lab for daily use.
The power supply eventually failed and the lab tech armed with the schematics decided to repair it. He opened the box and found the prototype was just a bunch of regular batteries soldered in series/parallel configurations...

This story has stayed with me when I have to tackle the elusive definition of what is and is not integrity.

 

[Nicad]

That is quite a funny story. Wonder what the graduate ended up designing afterwards?
Must have been a last minute brain storm to come up with that.

 

[jmackro]

Oh yea, him. I think he got a job with Volkswagen, writing the code that handles emissions control for US market turbo diesels.

 

[Arde]

What brought back that old story to my mind is the 14 year old that just removed the shell out of a Radio Shack clock, put it in a different box and claimed he invented a clock.

My colleague got away with deception but was not invited to the White House.

Maybe we should employ this wunderkind to convert the E9 clock to digital... Let's see where he connects the Radio Shack 110V input to.