Post No. 1,568 – Cross posting: Yet more on engineering

This first appeared on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2020/05/yet-more-on-engineering.html.

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One of the things that is being made very apparent by the lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is that a lot of the travel that people do is actually unnecessary.

For years, it has seemed to me that the business people claiming travel and meeting face-to-face was essential were not being entirely open and honest: now I know they were downright lying, and using a convenient excuse to allow themselves to travel - and to do so at other people's expense.

That means that costs have been higher than necessary for clients, and those who are targetted by "security" persons (including anyone who is different, such as me) have been put through massive psychological damage for no reason whatsoever.

It's even worse than not allowing people to work remotely because of either

(a) distrust (perhaps expecting others to be as shifty as the distrustful person?), or
(b) an unhealthy reliance on work for human contact, instead of having a life.

There have, to be fair, also been some clients who are problems - some clients I've known over the years even have problems understanding how people can communicate effectively over a phone (especially a Town Clerk I used to work for in the 80s) or via email (too many people over the years) or by online meetings.

The pandemic is forcing those persons (a term those persons seem to like a lot, instead of the more normal and human word "people") to reconsider, and that is a good thing.

Some things won't, however, change, such as those clients who put totally unrealistic expectations into the technical specifications for tenders that are unrealistic. They're not "spurring people on to greater endeavours", or "using [allegedly] good project management to reduce costs", or whatever it is they think they're doing: they're just showing that they're IPOCs * who think they can get a pushbike at a skateboard's price and expect it to do the work of a ute. Over the decades there have been many bids that I have advised my company not to pursue because the client was, to be kind, not "technically literate" ** .

Maybe that, too, will one day change . . . (for the better, I mean).

 * I've starting using this to remove some of the profanity from the first draft of my autobiography: it stands for "insert pejorative of choice" - IPOC. 
 * This is the engineering version of IPOC.