Shortly after Grace and I were married, as we were preparing to take off for a three-year meander around the US in an old Continental Trailways bus that we had converted to out home and rolling computer workstation, Scott called and told me that he desperately needed us to fly to Australia and churn out documentation for the SIDA system. This was the name of the updated version of the RTDDA system he had created for the RAN. The Navy was holding back about $250k from his contract until the docs were done.
I told him that we were planning to leave on a long honeymoon in a couple days. He thought about that for about ten seconds and asked me to grab a pencil and write something down. When I was ready he read off his credit card info and told me he would pay for a great honeymoon in Australia, and pay all expenses and top dollar for our work. Be there in a week or so. And he hung up.
Grace and I discussed this and decided it sounded like fun, so we bought tickets and packed out stuff and caught a flight.
Scott had arranged for his dad, Aleck, to fly over at the same time. We ended up having a great time, and turned out what the officer in charge of the project said was the clearest documentation he had ever read. And they gave Scott the rest of his money.
It wasn’t until a few years later that we learned that SIDA was the French equivalent of AIDS.