• Question: is it fun being an engineer? Do you ever get exited? My dads an engineer too :)

    Asked by camy343 to Alex, Chris, Harriet, Jed, Ken on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by evan, meg001, 11mgazelshigh.
    • Photo: Ken Gibbs

      Ken Gibbs answered on 9 Mar 2012:


      It’s the greatest fun being an engineer. Even Harriet who works with poo most of the time, finds it interesting. And yes, I do get excited from time to time – like when I found someone who realised that collecting poo from latrines in a refugee camp could make him a lot of money – which solved our problem of how to have the latrines/loos emptied, and how to compost the material to be used for growing crops, so it was no longer a stinking problem. Oh, yes, and when the first Tara handpump produced water in a community and the kids realised that they could work it themselves, they had a water fight. Their excitement was infectious.

    • Photo: Harriet Fletcher

      Harriet Fletcher answered on 9 Mar 2012:


      All the time!! I get excited by new technology, by understanding how things work and by solving a tricky problem.
      As for fun, I think my work is good fun. Fortunately, I work with a really good bunch of people so we have a good old laugh most of the time. It’s important to see the funny side when you’re confronted by the poo from a whole city before breakfast has really settled in.
      I think work is like a group project, if you have a good team then the task is easier and much more enjoyable. My closest colleagues are friends as well and we are interested in the business of dealing with business and that makes it all the more fun.

    • Photo: Alexander Zacheshigriva

      Alexander Zacheshigriva answered on 10 Mar 2012:


      Yes. It can be. I guess it takes a certain type of mind, and not all days are packed with excitement. But even if you work in the office you do have challenges and team work and that’s what excites me. And sometime you can spend a few days trying to crack a problem and finally you find a solution that works. And that is quite exciting. Besides as an engineer you can end up in some of the most exciting places on earth. My highlight so far was probably crawling all around the HMS Illustrious.

    • Photo: Jed Ramsay

      Jed Ramsay answered on 12 Mar 2012:


      Well yesterday I was walking along the river looking for a ‘breach’ in the river bank – as in a big hole where all the water was coming out! That was quite good fun, especially when I found it… I just need to work out how fix it, before the river loses all it’s water!

      Tomorrow I’ll be out on a boat on the river looking at areas where silt, mud and gravel have built up and making it difficult to travel through. I’ll then need to come up with a plan to move all the silt, mud and gravel somewhere else out of the way. For me, that’s quite a fun way to spend my day and borders on exciting! Plus it probably means we’ll bring in a digger on a boat and start flinging a lot of mud around which is good fun to watch!

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