RE: The need for engineers

For 5-6 years I was on the Boughton (“BOW-tin;” as in “OW”) Park Commission, the volunteer Board that administered the so-called elitist country-club.
We’d hold a meeting every month, the regular monthly meeting of the Boughton Park Commission.
Lotsa elitist engineers presented various wacko proposals to deal with who knows what. —I remember once having a beaver problem, and showing around an Agent from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (“NYSDEC”), a beaver-expert.
After parting brambles and hiking down to pond-side, he viewed a beaver-hutch and said: “Yep; ya got beavers!”
Some engineer proposed a wacko solution. Seems it involved poisons of some sort, and/or building huge coffer-dam systems and rerouting creeks.
One proposal stands above all the others.
It had been determined that our East Pond was dead — that is, it had so little oxygen that any fish we stocked in it all died.
So we were told it needed to be aerated.
Okay, proposals needed to aerate pond.
One was some gizmo an engineer proposed that seemed like something R.G. LeTourneau would propose: “Ain’t nuthin ya can’t do with the faith of a mustard-seed, and a tanker-load a’ diesel.”
Suggested was this air-powered gizmo that floated on the pond-surface, its windmill powering an underwater churn that created bubbles to aerate the pond.
We all glanced at each other, as if to ask “is this guy for real?”
The engineer suggested two gizmos.
The pond is probably more than 300 acres, so how in the wide, wide world are them two gizmos gonna aerate that pond?
“So what’s it gonna actually do?” someone asked after the presentation.
“Line the pockets of the engineer,” someone snapped.

I’m sure some self-absorbed engineer has already been consulted regarding the West Bloomfield Town Hall.
But anything he proposes is gonna get considered by a board of citizens — much like the Boughton Park Commission.
AND THEY ARE SKEPTICAL, especially knowing how engineers are. (They think THEY [and only they] have the solutions to all the world’s problems; yet WOOPS, there goes the Floridy power-grid. Labeled a “human performance anomaly,” or something, but actually it was some Git-R-Dun engineer.)

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton Park, where I run and we walk our dog. It was called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked, because it will only allow taxpayers of the three towns that own it to use it. We are residents of one of those towns. —I was on their Commission.

RE: “Elitist engineers........” —My loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston, the ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, was trained as an engineer, and noisily claims superiority. I majored in History, so am therefore vastly inferior.

“R.G. LeTourneau” was the founder of LeTourneau University in Texas; where my blowhard brother-in-Boston was trained as an engineer. —LeTourneau (now dead) was a tub-thumping born-again Christian who’s greatest contribution to technology was electric-drive for the individual wheels of construction equipment. But he also invented lotsa wacko machines, including a gigantic diesel-powered tree-crusher, that could wipe out a whole forest in one fell swoop.

RE: “I’m sure some self-absorbed engineer has already been consulted regarding the West Bloomfield Town Hall.......” —This refers to my Town Hall blog.

“There goes the Floridy power-grid” is something I keep saying to my brother-in-Boston when he brags about the mental superiority of engineers (and he is one). —Last year half the Florida power-grid was disabled by an operator trying to fix things, and disregarding procedure. The guy was an engineer. My brother called that a “human performance anomaly.”