CFB Trenton

I watched a Canadian Soldier come back to Trenton on the evening news and I was transported back to my younger brothers funeral in 1992. A cold hard day in North Wales, a hint of rain and a gaggle of twenty-somethings with red eyes and knots in their stomachs.

A brother who was eleven years my junior, killed in a senseless way and my entire family hit by it's own personal tsunami.

I miss him, my dear mum, my dad and I miss the boy I was before it all started to be washed away.

Signs and Portents

All hell is breaking loose at the emporium at the moment, there are people running around like headless chickens trying to do the impossible in the shortest possible time.

Yes, here at ground zero, not only do we attempt the impossible, but we deliver the impossible yesterday. In fact, we can do the improbable and the impractical quicker than any other company and we specialize in the incompatible and the incomplete.

Circle the wagons and send out the crap, even if it’s not finished, we’ll finish it, if it’s deemed as questionable quality, if a deadline is looming, we’ll buy it off.

Ignore the poor little children, hanging upside down in frozen fir trees while their teddies burn on the tarmac, ignore perceived danger and pilot and passenger safety because we must relax our outdated standards.

Hey, don’t forget that there’s a schedule to keep here, an important date is looming and the team must meet it.

(touches nose and points)

You got that one right, Hector!

Time to Change

If anyone reads this blog on a semi-regular basis, there'll be a time of change, there will be a transitional phase, latency, a sort of communication lag between now and then. In engineering terms I was taught that latency is a time delay between the moment something is initiated and the moment its first effect begins.

In my life, the move from one province in Canada to another has been initiated and the effects, well, the effects will be documented, perhaps not here, because, lets face it, this isn't anything really is it?

Dave latency.

I'm not signing off, just gonna wander about for a bit and be latent, I expect that I will be back soon and maybe, maybe I'll start writing something worth reading or just end up turning into my gaseous state.

Cheers.

Out to get me.

Resistentialism is defined as a “mock philosophy which maintains that inanimate objects are hostile to humans,” and at the weekend, while packing up my room, many inanimate objects ganged up on me all at once to inflict great pain.

Things were against me, that’s for sure. How can I explain how a wall curio display placed it’s way below my foot while my focus was distracted by an errant nail poking out of the wall, the sharp edge threading it’s way between my toes and deliciously applying cold yet white hot pain through my entire leg and into the base of my brain.

How could I explain, besides total lack of coordination, the pliers missing that same nail and biting into the fleshy bit of my palm and then, as a scrumptious third course, when pulling the tea towel off my bench, the resounding thump of a three pound milling leg, possibly the heaviest thing left in the room, tenderizing the second smallest toe on the same foot.

Yum, Yum, Pigs bum.

Kings Men

I was rather bemused that the recent bridge failure in the states was spun in terms of "just because the bridge collapsed does not mean it was not safe" which sort of reminds me of my own career in the business "just because the landing gear failed on test does not mean it was not strong enough" and the great Boeing corporation with the "just because the wing failed at 6% lower than the design load does not mean it was not strong enough"

We're all at risk, because we're all human. If we think that the doctor is going to be 100% right in his diagnosis, well, just factor in the human element, six months could be six months, or six days, or the rest of time. They know something, but they don't know everything.

Winging it is part of all our lives, structural engineers, doctors, postmen and brain surgeons. We should learn that this is normal, people will make mistakes and life cannot be programmed like a spreadsheet, macro or remote.

Bridges will fall down, Humpty Dumpty will fall off the wall, and, surprise, kings men and confused horses will be powerless to do anything.

But pick up the pieces.