The quotes below are from my boss and department head at Lockheed, Stan Rusk. He retired in 1990, and died in the mid 1990s. I post them here for laughs. These quotes were all his statements at meetings the latter of four years I was there (after I decided to write them down).
Now, what do we tell them? How about "We never encountered this problem because the link was never made?" Yea! Why don't we tell them the truth?Yea! That's it! Bad cable! [At a meeting trying to figure out why the sytem doesn't work, as I walk in with the announcement that I found a bad cable (but not necessarily the cause of the system problem).]
Let's just do a pre-test; if it doesn't work, we won't run the actual test.
We got to make up a story that would make them [management] happy.
Let's just gerrymander the data. [Some data met noise specs, some didn't, depending on the test run, for reasons we never fully understood. Tests run after-hours had better results, so it might have been environmental.]
Stan Rusk is one of the brightest people I've met, technically. Even at near retirement he remembered his calculus integration tables which I have to look up. He was also expert at getting money for his department, by spending it!