Four-star ocean going success

[hirez]

If you've not already done so, I commend one and all to view the fascinating 'Crude Britannia' series on BBC4.

Remarkable engineering and an atmospheric soundtrack.

I guess it's making me stop and think because we have this attitude (or at least that's what it seems like to me) that we don't do engineering in this country, it's all too hard, make do and mend, second-rate public private partnership, challenging career in pension sales, fast track to success by wearing a suit and braying into a phone like a cock with a shite haircut.

And yet.

People built these bloody great things the size of starships in a field in Scotland, towed them out into the middle of the North Sea and then left them there in a howling gale.

Can't do that, cost over-run, budget increase in real terms, inject liquidity into the banking system, buy-to-let, property ladder.


Wankers.


Anyway.

In the old days, when I crawled out of bed close to lunchtime with a thick head, it was because I'd been out having it average the night before. These days it's because I've spent circa twelve hours in work of a weekend. Phew, rock&roll, eh?

Comments

[drpete.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Mind you, those chaps at the A1 loco trust have made a smashing return to engineering with Tornado. I gather even off duty besuited wankers take their children to see it. Probably to imprint them that engineering is dangerous and bad, and they should do economics at school, but hey-ho.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to adopt Starbucks sizing and start referring to 'having it venti'.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Well, the thing with banking - and people who've never worked in the field don't believe this, but it's true - is one of the most meritocratic and classless industries going. For every braying Old Etonian there's an (equally braying) Essex barrowboy, and no-one bats an eyelid if the latter gets paid more. A lot more. How does this affect technical fields? Because a bank will happily pay a programmer whatever the market rate is, and whatever he or she's brazen enough to ask for. The traders are getting paid so much more than anyone (and only care about their pay relative to other traders) that no ego gets involved. But in traditional engineering, it doesn't work like that. The manager has very fixed notions in his head about what it means to be a manager. He went to a redbrick or Oxbridge, studying a non-engineering subject, then he went via the milkround to the "graduate fast track management programme" and he doesn't know what the engineers actually do (but it must be easy) and there is no way in hell an engineer or a technician - a worker - is going to be paid more than him.

Anyone smart enough to graduate as an engineer is smart enough to figure all this out, and if it was about saving the economy we might have done it too, but since said management tossbags would take the credit and the rewards, what's the point?

[latexiron.livejournal.com]

I have the whole of "The secret War" on bittorrent. I fancy building an ME163. Can I have the peroxide delivered to your house?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes. I'll put it next to the Paraquat.

I wonder if one could build a liquid-fuel Great Panjandrum?