Professor Anton Mendoza became paralyzed for more than a year.
The realization that he had been following the wrong path and worked towards a dead end in mech design was a substantial blow to his life as well as his design philosophy.
It became so bad that he was forced to take a break from his duties. His conflicting thoughts simply left him unable to deliver adequate work because he constantly questioned his usual design solutions.
What previously looked fine and serviceable suddenly became inadequate and not sufficient in his warped perspective.
It left him feeling so incompetent that he wasted hours and hours of work time to refine his solutions or come up with other methods to present a better possibility.
While his delays would have been mildly acceptable if he was able to deliver measurably superior results like what Carmin Olson had done, the problem was that Anton failed to improve the performance of any of the designs he was responsible for during that time!
