I may have mentioned before that I am an Engineer. My degree is in Civil Engineering and I worked as a Civil Engineer for a number of years. I have built and worked on some pretty impressive stuff over the years. I have built a few roads, the odd bridge here and there and a good number of water process plants. I was also on the tender stage of some of the interesting bits of Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL). I worked on the winning bid for the St Pancras redevelopment. I would have loved to go to the royal opening tonight but alas I was not invited. I saw that job last year when I went past St Pancras and was amazed to see that the logo I had created to represent our bid team (it was a 3-way joint venture) was being used as the job logo. It was flying high for all to see on the tower cranes and on the hard hats and high vis vests of the men on site. I was flabbergasted to say the least. The logo was only ever supposed to be a quick fix, it wasn’t even supposed to be the actual logo we were using on the bid documents, but there you go!
Anyway, I shall come to the point. As an engineer I have some specific skills which come in handy now and again. One such skill is ‘levelling’. I can, using an optical level to work out at what level something should be set at – very handy if you want to lay a very large patio for instance.
F-i-L knows I have these skills and occasionally exploits them – the only problem is that whilst we both know what we’re doing, we don’t actually know what each other is doing. My way of doing things is very different to his. He thinks that mostly I’m wrong and tries to get me to do it his way. I mostly think that he is wrong and try to get him to do it my way.
And so it came to pass that last Sunday I spent from 10am until 4pm standing in a garden ‘discussing’ how we should set out the patio. We did break for lunch about 1 and thanks to M-i-L for a lovely roast but other than that we got pretty much nothing achieved…
Just for the record, if we’d have done it my way I’d have been done by 10:45….
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2 comments:
Oh, those types of arguments. Where the other party knows you likely know better, but can't admit it. Too funny!
That is pretty much spot on - although I know better than to disagree with him. Although by 4pm on a cool november afternoon having wasted an entire day my sense of humour was failing me.
In all honesty I should feel very privelaged. He never normally 'discusses' anything with anyone....
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