Re: The Lessons of ValuJet 592

[Tracy Boyington <tracy_boyington -at- OKVOTECH -dot- ORG>]

Hutchings, Christa wrote:

> Was it really fictitious? Wow, I hope so - I've always thought it was a
> pretty tragic situation.

IMHO, a little too tragic to be so obscure, so I hope you can put your
mind at ease now. :-)

> However, I didn't get the sense when I was reading it that it was
> fictitious. And I believe I saw it in a school newsletter - perhaps
> someone had "lifted" it from the STC journal and left out the
> "fictitious" introduction (?)

<dig dig dig> It appears in the March 1995 issue of the STC's monthly
publication _Intercom_. Reading it again, I see it does not carry the
"all our ethics cases are fictitious" introduction that they use now, so
I can see why one might assume it was true. In fact, some of the
respondents seemed to think it was true. However, a couple of quick web
searches (Lycos and Alta Vista) for the company involved (Indimarc)
turned up absolutely nothing, which seems unlikely for a company
involved in such a gruesome situation as recently as late 1994 (as
stated in the article).

The byline on the article is John Bryan... if he's a techwhirler I hope
he will fill us in. But it looks fictional to me.

> Well, even if it was fictitious, it still makes me a little wary of
> putting my name in a manual. If someone wants to try to sue me because
> of a product manual I was involved with, I want them to jump through
> hoops to find out who I am.

They will... no CEO is going to take the heat just because it's too much
trouble to find out who wrote the manual. :-D

Tracy

--
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Tracy Boyington   mailto:tracy_boyington -at- okvotech -dot- org
Oklahoma Dept. of Vocational & Technical Education
Stillwater, OK, USA
http://www.okvotech.org/cimc/home.htm
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