It’s like telemarketers. They may make hundreds of calls a day. If one person pays $20,000 for a scam, it’s worth all the wasted calls.

Showtalk said:

It’s like telemarketers. They may make hundreds of calls a day. If one person pays $20,000 for a scam, it’s worth all the wasted calls.

Yes. And it makes the site unusuable for regular users.

Speaking of unusable - the bi-weekly Texas Workforce Commission "teleserv" call pilgrimage has zero provisions to backtrack or review answers and questions if you even get into their system. And it shuts off at 18:00 hours. If the call is dropped, too bad. It is a total "Charlie Foxtrot" of inefficient design, a choke point through which everything is filtered, and you just get this "due to overwhelming call volume yada yada yada"

I hate that. 

I suspect there are a lot of people who have never gotten a dime of unemployment because they can't navigate the bottleneck.

That is true.

And I got a call from someone who was at a remote site and described a failure mode that could have been prevented. So there's maybe a product line to fix it that could have several hundred installations just with that one company's sites alone. So we're making a list of all the shortcomings while I'm making a rough block diagram sketch on graph paper and thinking up some specific schematic details and a couple of components, some features, some smarts to put in the thing.

Essentially I also can see several other product lines that could stem from it to deal with a facet of critical infrastructure, as an add-on device.

I said half jokingly that we can probably get the thing prototyped and as long as funding to get into production can be done long before the unemployment stuff actually pays off.

I figure that if he actually gets that specification list together, I can probably crank out a workable design in a couple of days.

Great! You are good at that.

He has to get his fecal matter aggregated with getting all the specs out. But I heard enough that I think I can rough in a lot of the design.

And it's pretty easy to draw schematics on a machine and even do a rough circuit  board layout, and get ahead of the design cycle, even if most of it has to be ECO'ed on computer screen long before picking up a soldering iron or even ordering some parts.

There's a nice little microcontroller that I happen to have a few hundred of in some tubes on a shelf out here, and a big code library I've built over the past 20 years for that processor family. It's ideal to do all sorts of smart monitoring to generate alarm setpoints, turn on LEDs, and such, so you just look at the box and you have a series of fault warnings.

I’m lost but it sounds successful and useful

I figure if I can build a product and sell it on-line, that may yield revenue a lot faster than waiting on a bureaucracy to finally drop some money into my tin cup.

Or as one motivational speaker once said decades ago, if you're waiting for your ship to come in, sometimes you have to jump in the water and swim out to it.