31 July 2008

True love

My husband loves me!

Hubby's an engineer who designs industrial robots. One division of the company makes package handling robots. Often times these robots are designed for companies like General Mills to move large quantities of cereal or other products around. Many times the robots position cereal boxes to be crated or wrapped for delivery to places like Sam's Club or Costco. Many times, companies send their product to the company my husband works for so that they are able to test the robots and make sure they work. Actual food that the company doesn't want back because it's been in the hands of someone else and out of their sight and control. Non-perishable items are often times given to employees when the testing is complete.

Today, my beloved, knowing my favorite thing in the world is a good brownie (even a bad one is still good), got me a six pound box of General Mills brownie mix. Six pounds!!! If that's not love, I don't know what it is!!

5 comments:

gemoftheocean said...

Robotics. Kewl. One aspect I never wanted to work in. When I was at General Dynamics, one of our supervisors sent an "Object lesson in the importance of testing software properly."

Seems some company had made software that controlled a robotic device which assisted in giving chemo treatments for radiation.

If there was a low dosage of radiation to be given then there was "no shield" moved over the business end of the machine....if a high dosage, it was to be filtered through a shield of some sort. Well, somewhere along the line in the testing, the software designers "assumed" that to get to a certain key to put the shield in the "down" position the the end user would have used a TAB key rather than some other method. Instead the person got their via arrow or some such scenario. Result....shield not moved down into place....patient zapped with wayyyyy too much radiation and they died as a result.

swissmiss said...

The company my husband works for typically hires engineers and trains them in the software because it's easier to train an engineer to learn the software than it is to teach a software person to have a comfort level with the things my husband does. He doesn't work in the material handling/packing robotics area, but more of the military/aerospace area (since his degree is in aerospace engineering and mechanics and he worked in that field for years). I blogged awhile back about the company being asked to bid on a job to "retrofit" Chernobyl and the project hubby may work on to move and load bombs from the aircraft carriers to the planes. Plus, he deals with huge cranes and moving heavy, HEAVY things and moving them with a good rate of speed which gives your average software person ulcers!

Anonymous said...

Six pounds of brownie mix sounds more like eternal passion to me! You are a lucky woman indeed, Swiss Miss!! I recall my mother saying how happy she was to get a refrigerator instead of a diamond engagement ring. That was right after WW2 and major appliances were hard to come by. My own husband secured my undying love with a new top-of-the-line steam iron ten years ago. Funny what thrills some women, huh?! Eat a brownie for me!

Unknown said...

When I was an undergrad at the U here, a friend, a pre-Med major of some kind, got a job in a General Mills testing lab. Something like one out of every 10,000 packages would be pulled off of the production line and sent to the testing lab where perhaps only half of them would actually be tested.

The remainder went to the employees. Unfortunately, my friend didn't have seniority so he didn't get to go through the boxes until all the other people in the lab had taken the Wheaties, Cheerios, etc.

But every now and then he would come home with something yummy to eat.

Anonymous said...

Mmmmmmm.....brownies! Are you getting a bit thin lately? Well, you could always whip up the entire six pounds and mail me a pound or two--LOL.