Never Work With Scientists or Engineers

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Forget never working with children or animals. Never work with Scientists or Engineers.

Picture the scene, dear reader; the air is being turned blue with the kind of language usually reserved for the rugby scrum. Things are being thrown.

A calming voice comes from a distant room enquiring what the problem might be. I respond using “language” that mounting the picture in the frame has not gone as well as I had anticipated, it’s not quite central. I may have used the word “disaster”. I can’t recall what the other words were but I seem to recall them being quite short and decidedly pointy.

“But you can fix it,” comes that calming voice again, “you can fix anything.” I take a deep breath, think for a bit and conclude that yes, I can fix it.

There then follows a few minutes of calm and concentration before once again the demons are unleashed, the air turns blue again and more everyday household objects find themselves travelling at unnatural speeds towards various hard surfaces.

“Problems?” enquires the calming voice.

“Yes, ” I reply. You will understand of course that my actual reply was somewhat longer than this but there are international treatise preventing me from disclosing the full transcript. I then continue to explain the cause of my frustration, “have you ever tried to cut 1/4 of a millimetre off the side of a piece of A4 card? It’s impossible!”

It was at that point it hit me, I had a steel ruler on top of a piece of card, both clamped to a cutting mat and I was using a razor blade to trim off a tiny amount to correct an error that only I was ever going to know was there. It was pointless, I should have just put the card in the frame and forgotten about the tiny mistake.

That 1/4mm level of passion, that level of attention to detail is entirely the sort of thing that’s required if you’re an engineer that is, say, responsible for ensuring that 999 (911 ,112)  calls get dealt with correctly (which I am). When mounting a picture however it’s more like an anti-skill, a trait that does more harm than good.