Dennis Nerdlinger takes his Prius to work. It was a relatively expensive car, but he loved the engineering of the on-off thingy that shut down the car's gas engine when it was at a stop light. Dennis works for Shmoeing Labs, a giant publicly-traded defense contractor. What do they contract? Projects from the government. Secret ones. Dangerous ones. Ones that go boom.

Dennis has been at Shmoeing for thirty-four years and has done just about everything there. He began his career as a kind of ombudsman: He came out of Annapolis and knew "everyone" in the space program. His job after leaving active duty was to shake hands with the government-issue muckety-mucks who greenlight money to pay for Shmoeing to design and build stuff.

That was fun, but it wasn't where Dennis really belonged. It wasn't long before his mad engineering skills were assigned the left front door hinges on the Space Shuttle. They had to handle a lot of rattling, extreme temperature fluctuations, and other compressive forces. Sort of like the back of the van Dennis had dreamed of owning on his lonely Saturday nights as a youth.

Dennis graduated from simple mechanical devices to eventually run the Systems group, which today is working on improved oxygen flow throughout commercial jets. The challenge is that the new jets fly about 20% higher than the old ones (47,000 feet instead of 37,000 feet) to save fuel and open more lanes in the highway in the sky—there's lots of traffic up there. When the cabin pressures grew, those pressures did strange things to oxy pipes. Dennis and the gang are in charge of making sure that the back of the cabin gets enough O2 after the crew serves chili.

^{You might want to cut back on the chili, gramma.}

Dennis spends most of his time in his lab, which is a simulated 47,000 foot cabin. He tries to optimize the flow of oxygen around the entire plane at any altitude, checking with a hazy purple gas. Dennis measures data, reviews reports from his younger minions, and dreams of some day being a member of the roughly-ten-mile-high club.

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