Linear Tech and Maxim smackdown at the loco

So my analog guru buddy Eric Schlaepfer, who worked at Maxim at the time, came over to St. John’s grill, where a lot of us analog folks get hammered, ahhh, errr, I mean conduct inter-company team-building exercises. Eric was all jazzed and had an advertisement for a new MAX17710 Maxim charger chip for micro-battery energy cell. He also brought over an ultra cool Maxim demo board with a thin energy cell on it. Pretty soon the whole table of analog aficionados are talking about this great Maxim part and playing with the demo board and just generally behaving like a bunch of engineers with spiffy new toys.

Well this must have got the goat of my pal Tim “TimerBlox” Regan, who is an applications manager over at Linear Tech. Just as we are all hunched over the Maxim ad, Tim flatly states “This isn’t a place where we talk about work” And he snatches the Maxim ad from under our very eyes, and rips it into pieces.

This was over the top, even for our intrepid band of analog wild people. Eric took the whole thing in stride and laughed it off. It really didn’t matter since we were more interested in the demo board, as you would expect. Hardware trumps paper in the hearts of all real engineers.

So a couple months go by, and we all happen to be back at St. John’s one night, and it is Tim “TimerBlox” Regan that comes in with a Linear Tech advertisement. I have to admit, it was pretty cool, since it was for a LT5400, a part that is just 4 resistors that LT sells for $3.49. Talk about chutzpah. Anyway, Tim is waving the ad around and talking about it and all excited. So yeah, Eric has way too much class, but I gleefully snatched it from Tim’s hands, ripped it into pieces and flatly said “Hey, we don’t talk about work here”.

Tim worked in England for many years so I fully expected him to clang a beer mug, ahh errrr, I mean a team-building implement, upside my smirking head. Fortunately, like Eric, Tim is a class act, and laughed it off. Maybe this will be a new tradition at the loco, as we call St John’s. Anybody who brings in an ad, even for a part they worked on, gets it ripped up and they have to buy the beer, ahhhh errrr, I mean team-building social lubricant.

Here is a nice picture of Tim Regan I found lurking in my hard drive. We joke with him that when he wears these wild shirts on Friday we know he didn’t have to lay anybody off or discipline them with a PIP (performance improvement plan). If you see us at St. Johns, feel free to sit down, but do have a pitcher or two in your hands when you do it, or Tim will castigate you.

Here is a pic of Eric Schlaepfer I found on my hard drive. He is showing off his Android phone, kinda prescient, since he just left Maxim to go work for a big monopoly that’s name starts with G and ends in oogle.