TPS Reports: They Are Not What You Think

Story by @GIJoeRepairShop

Mike Judge is known as the creator of multiple award-winning television shows such as Beavis and Butthead, Daria, King of the Hill, Silicon Valley, and many others. The most famous movie that he wrote is “Office Space.” It is still quoted endlessly by office workers today who are unhappy with their choice of careers or with the boss to whom they’ve been assigned. One running joke in Office Space concerns “TPS reports” and whether or not the main characters have completed their TPS reports appropriately. In the movie, a TPS report is never well defined. Instead, it has become a stand-in for a piece of meaningless, tedious corporate busywork. It has become the a symbol for pointless office bureaucracy.

However, TPS reports are real. Furthermore, they are a direct reference to one of Mike Judge’s earliest jobs in San Diego. Coronado Island, in San Diego bay, is home to the Naval Air Systems Command’s (NAVAIR’s) Fleet Readiness Center Southwest (FRCSW). Here, fleets of F/A-18s and other Navy and Marine Corps aircraft are maintained, overhauled, and updated to be readily deployable once more.

Mike Judge’s first professional job out of college was as a programmer for F/A-18 avionics, as a contractor working for Support Systems Inc. One giant piece of automatic test equipment that Judge may have used during his time at FRCSW is called the Consolidated Automated Support System (CASS). CASS is about the size of a small living room and supports the testing of multiple pieces of military avionics within a single computer-based test system.

What’s used to give CASS instructions? Test Program Sets, or TPSs. A TPS is a computer program which instructs CASS how to test a particular piece of avionics. So, a “TPS report” refers to a list of electrical or electronic failures being reported by CASS about a particular avionics box from a Navy or Marine Corps aircraft. Navy technicians need to ensure that an avionics box is fully repaired and has a clean run on CASS before the avionics box is returned to service – a clean TPS report.

If Judge himself did not directly contribute code to a TPS, he certainly would have been very familiar with them.