Farewell my Captain - Jerry Schlaghek ; we had great times together !

Cincinnati Native Dr. Jerry Schlaghek 

      It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of my friend and one time mentor from the school of hard knocks, Jerry Schlaghek. Jerry passed away yesterday 8th Sept due to a stroke and never recovered according to his son Ben. :(

     I knew Jerry through work when we were attempting to sell technological improvements to many a manufacturing company in Singapore in the late 90s till 2000. Though the times were hard then, we had a ball of a time and many stories or pronouncements by Jerry were and still resonate with me now. Here are a few and I quote 2 

1. Cancer is big business.

2. I have a cure for AIDS 

    A humble and brilliant man, Jerry was in one word, a maverick. 

    His run ins with the big corporations and frustrations with the US bureaucracy led him and his company to Asia. I handled Jerry's products for about a year and a half 2008 till 2000, until I decided that the core business of our environmental chambers had recovered to the extent that I needed to focus back to the mainstream livelihood, that of selling environmental test solutions that our paths diverged.

    The last night when we had a magnificent dinner with our host Mr. Hong and his business associates including Jerry will remain with me forever. It was indeed an unforgettable evening.

    I recall distinctly one presentation we had with Seagate, whereby I did the initial show and tell of our week's results using then advanced technology to find out the cold  and extreme hot spots. These would give the production manager an early indication of the immediate failure which in circuit tester would catch, but more importantly the latent failure which would take weeks or months to happen. 

    This would be the selling edge for this technology especially for the prospect of predicting field failures before they happen and sending these latent failures back to rework before they hit the customers and when that happens, the field recall would be totally disastrous.

   As the presentation went on, the Senior Director was not impressed by my 'show and tell'. I did the best I could with as much information I could garner from the data. She asked just one question : "So what ?" and my presentation went down the tubes.I would have been red faced if I was not dark skinned ! 

   Everyone in the room was stunned, all the 10 staff there,and our team of 5 were also shell shocked. Out of the blue came the calm and reassuring voice of Jerry detailing and more importantly explaining all the intricacies and highlighting the strengths and of course the limitations of the then advanced technology.

  He gave a magnus opus of the first principles of the technology as well as where the solution would lie. By getting more and more products tested there would be a stable test bed of data from which the absolute failures would be screened out and the latent failures could be red marked and sent for rework. That process would be the next phase where the vendor and the customer needed to work together to settle the framework to determine which 'passed' and which was 'marginal pass require rework'.

  The meeting ended well, with us continuing to persue the end goal. A first in Asia order for their revolutionary product.

 

We did not succeed, but his fervor and joie d vrie was infectious. 

Rest well my Captain. We had fun while it lasted.