Dan, first of all congratulations! It's very well deserved.
One of the things I really enjoy about Wildstang is how close all of the mentors are. We spend a lot of time together, of course, and we get along really well. A side effect of this is that we joke around a lot, and we're constantly giving each other a hard time. Dan probably ends up on the receiving end of this more than he should. We pretty much constantly make fun of him for his "management" and being the "old guy" (he's not really old but it's fun to tease him about it). The truth is that even though we did change all the locks on our shop to keep him out, Dan handles an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work and I'm sure the rest of us don't even know the magnitude of it. Keeping a team like ours running inside a large corporation that is constantly trying to cut costs is unbelievably time consuming as many of you from other teams surely know. Dan silently handles all of this red tape and many, many other facets of team management and allows the rest of us to focus on the engineering side of things.
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Originally Posted by Andy Baker
These fathering skills come in handy while Dan is leading some of the younger Wildstang engineers through the season (psst... for a good time, ask Dan about team seating at the Midwest regional while he is in front of the other engineers on Wildstang. That discussion provided me with over an hour of entertainment at a Chicago eatery last year).
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Andy, we prefer to think of this as giving Dan practice for when Lauren gets a little older. We constantly drill him on how to handle heated discussions, sibling/friend in-fighting, and childish stubbornness
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Anyway, this is a great opportunity for us on the team to say "Thanks, Dan". We definitely don't say it as often as we should. And since we know you're dying to get back to your software roots, I'll check to see how far along the electrical team is with that punch-card interface for the robot controller.
