One Bad Apple is All it Takes

It's always been a dream of mine to own a company. There's the trill of being in control, fighting to keep everyone paid, and of course my company would be technology centric so I could be on the cutting edge. I realized today that one bad employee, at any level in the company, could ruin the whole thing. Part of this realization came from my new set of bicycle rims being stolen and the other part came from some record breaking NASA news.
The bicycle rims were a birthday present from my parents. They were being FedExed to my apartment and I've never had any issues with deliveries there. Now, bicycle rims aren't small, the box measured 3 feet tall and wide. When I saw the tracking information claiming the package was delivered I expected to find the rims at the front office of the apartment complex. For some reason the FedEx driver left a small package at the front office and decided to leave my giant package at the front door of my apartment. Of course the package was stolen, because one bad apple didn't care enough to think it's foolish to leave packages out in an apartment complex. I don't have a signed agreement with FedEx allowing them to leave packages, so this has reflected very poorly on the company in my mind.
The NASA news is that the Spirit rover on Mars is about to become the longest running program on Mars. Both Spirit and Opportunity were designed to be 90-day missions, and they have both survived more than 6 years! The engineers and crew for these two missions have done a fantastic job! The bad apple side of this story is in the way NASA has taken engineers and mission crew like this and ground them into the pavement with terrible management practices. Granted this problem involves several bad managers, but it had to start with one bad policy decision.
The second revision of circuit boards for the balloon are due in this week, so look for a good status update next week or this weekend. I am tentatively planning to launch on the 3rd of July from a location close to Billings, MT. I will post the exact launch date and time as soon as I get all of my crew to buy their plane tickets. Anyone who wants to help of observe is welcome to show up. Science is always more fun with a group of spectators to see your fantastic failures! Check out the latest NASA balloon project in Australia for a worst case scenario of what you might see at my balloon launch.