Apologies for lack of Blog

My apologies for not blogging over the last couple of days, no real excuse except lack of time and being tired. The end of last week was busy, what with shifts on the railway and work at the Rainbow Centre, as well as lack of sleep on election night. The weekend brought some respite and the chance to see our lovely grandchildren. We were very successful at getting them to bed on Saturday without any ridiculous bribery. However inevitably they were up and about early on Sunday for stories and a pretend game in our bed.

Following breakfast we drove to Runcorn near Liverpool to see some old friends. We had a lovely relaxed day of conversation and lunch. The only downside was the weather that meant that we could not sit in their delightful garden. Again though we did not arrive home until quite late, though I experienced a Starbucks drive through for the first time.

Today I had an eye check-up at the local hospital. I think that a process review is needed; the face time with medical professionals was approximately five minutes for which I waited two hours in total. The maths of this just does not work. However the upside was that I managed to catch up with my magazine reading.

An interesting article about product recalls (in this case cars) caught my fancy. First of all it hypothesised that engineers look at the world through a different prism. To illustrate we talk bout optimists and pessimists as being glass half full or glass half empty people. Apparently engineers look at this completely differently, they see a glass that is not the right size. Further it’s said this was why people misunderstood Jimmy Carter. They though he was a southern Democrat farmer, whereas actually he looked at the world through the eyes of an engineer which was how he had been trained.

Well enough of this digression, it seems that the almost the entire product recalls for cars are unnecessary or have only marginal benefits. It cited the recent case of the Toyotas, which accelerated suddenly. Apparently this was the fault of extra floor mats and the failure of the driver to select the correct pedal, accelerating rather than braking. Further there was the famous case of the Ford Pinto in which three girls were killed when the fuel tank exploded when it was rear-ended. Now this was caused when the fuel tank ruptured and burst into flames. It turns out that actually any small car of the time when rear-ended at the speed involved would have burst into flames. Iit would have been far more effective it terms of saving lives if more money had been spent on police to enforce speeding. However that was not the message that the public wanted to hear.

So my time today was not wasted after all.