That's funny that the other place you heard it was from a gte employee. By any chance was he craft ( worked in the field ) at any time in his career or admin/management. It might be more of a coincidence that the guys who work in craft tend to have a decent mechanical aptitude and have to deal with the cause and effect chain of events. given that, who more than rube goldberg had a grasp on this?

I identified with rube goldberg in highschool when a project for science came up with a minimum 10 steps to turn on a light switch. Fun stuff.