English vs ENG-glish Lesson #2: On The Rocks

Every profession has jargon. Engineering and FMCG have some gems that are worth sharing.

English:

Ice = Crucial ingredient in most cocktails and alcoholic pleasures

ENG-glish:

ICE = Instrumentation, Control and Electrical. As in instrumentation engineers, control engineers and electrical engineers. In my experience, these guys (along with the maintenance teams), are the new engineering graduate's life line. At the plants that I worked at the ICE teams were generally made up of older engineers who had been there for years. They have a wealth of experience, practical ideas and dirty jokes.

BFN

I've been working on a project for the last few months that will be implemented across the country over the next year or so. Currently the team is gearing up to implement in Bloemfontein and I've been spending a few days a week there.

On Friday night I flew home to Cape Town from Bloem on The Little Plane That Could. Really, the plane was little bigger than a 2 litre Coke bottle! Small plane from a small town. The whole of Bloem can probably fit into Boksburg North!

The small town lifestyle is growing on me though. Everything is ten minutes away. There is no traffic. The hotel only starts serving breakfast at 7am. 7am! When I'm in Joburg some of my meetings start at 7am. The Bloem team normally starts working at 9am. They've been opening early to accommodate training and project activities. Early = 8am. I am not kidding. Allegedly they work until 6pm, but for the first two weeks I was practically booted out at 4:30pm on the days I was there. It feels like an alternative universe compared with Joburg and Cape Town. Ok, more especially Joburg. For the first two days I didn't know what to do with myself when I had to leave work that early. The sun was still up!! It was the equivalent of high school being dismissed at 12pm in the middle of term on a Monday! It felt wrong, almost shameful, not to be working until 7pm or 8pm.

This was week 3 in Bloem and I think by now I have been detoxed from my previous workaholic ways. I keep thinking I'll work at the hotel after hours to make up for the fact that I'm leaving work before sunset, but I just don't. Everyone is so chilled and it's rubbing off on me like a disease. I have been detoxed to the point that my brain feels numb and I can't focus. To the point where I have to remind myself what my last name is. Remind myself what this project is about. Remind myself that I am a manager and a senior member of this team and need to set a hard-working example. Remind myself that there will be no obscene engineer-sells-out-to-banking-performance-bonus if this project doesn't deliver efficiencies!

Oh, but it's so hard to care in that sleepy little town. BFN. Brain Fully Numbed. *yawn*

Where’s my picket fence?

I have had an exhausting couple of weeks. Work is hectic. My inbox is filling faster than I can clear it and I have had back to back meetings almost every day. I am commuting from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Bloemfontein on a weekly basis, living out of a suitcase, working 12 hour days and coming “home” to an empty hotel room. This is one of those times when I wish I were a doting housewife living the simple life.

The key to being a good housewife, as far as I can tell, is efficiency and planning. And as an engineer, I think I would be excellent at running a home like a well-oiled machine. To be honest, I often fantasize about drawing up cleaning and inspection schedules for my domestic worker to follow. You know… like with different frequencies for inspecting and cleaning different rooms and objects in my flat, with pictures of how things should look before and after cleaning… But I just never get around to it.

If I were a housewife, I would simply execute those schedules and checklists like clockwork. And of course build a replenishment forecasting tool on Excel to manage my grocery inventory and work in progress stocks (e.g. of work in progress… frozen, grated tomato cubes ready for adding to a dish on the stove). And in my spare time design a system to route all the grey water from the kitchen and bathroom down to the garden. And get solar panels installed to reduce my household’s electricity consumption.

Yep. Domestic bliss.

English vs ENG-glish Lesson #1: Kaboom

Every profession has jargon. Engineering and FMCG have some gems that are worth sharing.

English:
Bomb = Device that goes KABOOM in cartoons.

ENG-glish:
BOM = Bill of Material. This acronym is actually used in sentences like “Please explode the BOM so that I can see how much perfume needs to be added per ton of shampoo?” Cracked me up when I heard this for the first time. Cracked me up even more to realise that everyone else now found this phrase perfectly normal.

PPE Part 2: I Hate Hadedas

PPE stands for Personal Protection Equipment (and Philosophy, Politics and Economics, but not on this blog). PPE, as the name suggests, is meant to protect you from injury and long-term damage to your senses as a result of exposure to operational health and safety risks. As a female engineer, it also protects you from flattery and compliments, and can cause long-term damage to your sense of femininity and style if you’re not vigilant. This is part 2 in a series of posts dedicated to the joys of wearing PPE.

I hate hadedas.

I was reminded of how much I hate hadedas on Tuesday morning as I lay in bed, desperately trying to oversleep. I had just hit snooze for the second time when the sparrows, or swallows or cuckoos - or whatever annoying bird species inhabit the trees outside my flat - started chirping. A good sound on a lazy Sunday morning. But on a Tuesday at 7am when you’re wishing you were a beach bum instead of a diligent professional? Not so much.

And this avian sensory assault of chirping made me think of hadedas. It made me think of how when I moved to Durban to start my first job, I had a squawking wake-up call from a few of these creatures every morning. At sunrise. Sunrise! Which in Durban in summer is around 5am. (My morning routine is purposely kept to 30 minutes so that I can sleep until 6:30am at least, and 7am where possible.) Anyway, like I said I had moved to Durban to start my first job. After about a week of learning about the company values and policies, filling out endless forms for pension, medical aid, taxes, etc and sitting through a factory induction, I got issued with all the relevant PPE and I was finally taken into the factory. Little did I realise that I had just been introduced to the antidote to the poisonous sound of 5am hadeda squawking: earplugs!

I remember feeling like I was under water the first time I wore them. We had the kind that you squeeze, compress and then stick into your ear. Once they’re in you feel them slowly expand and it’s as if some invisible DJ is fading out the sounds around you. You can talk to people but you have to concentrate a bit harder and speak a bit louder. And I don’t know if it’s just me but I swear when I wear earplugs it feels like I can hear the thud of each step I take from the inside of my head like the sound is travelling up through my bones from the floor.


They become a bit uncomfortable after wearing them for a while, but – as with all PPE – you get used to it. I can’t imagine that wearing them all day long, like plant operators have to, would be too pleasant though. Hence all the poster campaigns to remind and convince people to wear them.

At some point I forgot a pair of earplugs in my jeans pocket and unknowingly took them home. I left them on my dresser and forgot about them. I don’t remember the details anymore but somewhere along the line I realised that they were the perfect answer to my hadeda horrors. So perfect that I started going to sleep with them at night to make damn sure I slept through The Squawking. My earplugs became so precious to me that I started keeping them in a little ear-ring box next to my bed. And from time to time I would “forget” a pair in my pocket to replace the ones at home.

Good news for me is that the bank has recently begun enforcing hearing protection in certain areas of the cash centres where I work now. I think it’s time to fill the ear-ring box again. Or to buy a pellet gun.

Consolatory PPE perks: Daily incentive to clean your ears effectively. Trust me, you don’t want to remove an earplug in front of people and find a blob of ear wax attached to it.

Alternative uses: (1) Sleep enablers: As I've just harped on about... Hearing protection against hadedas and other annoying birds, snoring boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses or neighbourhood kids making a racket when you’ve had a late night. (2) Stress relief: They can serve as miniature squishy stress balls that you can play with when you’re bored in meetings.

Mountain out of a Mine Dump

This is where I grew up (and where I recently moved back to): Cape Town






This is where I should have moved to if I wanted a successful career as a hard core chemical engineer: Secunda








In my third year at varsity I turned down a bursary with a large petrochemical company purely because I could not see myself going to Secunda for two months of vac work, let alone moving there indefinitely. (Maybe a short-sighted decision, but let’s leave that for another post.)

I grew up in the city of Cape Town. The oldest city in South Africa, sometimes referred to as the Mother City, The Cape of Good Hope or The Cape of Storms. My family didn’t live in the fanciest of neighbourhoods but the beauty of living in Cape Town is that regardless of whether you live in the best or the worst neighbourhood you have some kind of view of the mountain, or the sea, or both. I lived about 40 minutes away from Table Mountain with the nearest beach less than 3 km away. Hiking up the mountain and lounging at the seaside were a regular part of my life and it never crossed my mind that one day that may change.

When I chose to study chemical engineering, I failed to realise one rather crucial detail: Chemical engineers do not work in pretty coastal cities like Cape Town. Real hard core chemical engineers work on mines or petrochemical plants. The biggest mines or petrochemical plants are in the middle of nowhere. And when you work on a mine or a petrochem plant, you also tend to live in the middle of nowhere in some odd little dorpie (dorp = town) with a name that ends in “burg”. Sasolburg, Rustenburg, Heidelburg, Middelburg. A dorpie that only exists because that particular mine or plant exists and the staff needs somewhere to live.

Me? I decided to opt for soft core chemical engineering in the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) industry. I started off by moving to Durban (a city on the east coast of South Africa), which at least had coastal appeal if not easy access to a mountain. A year later I weaned myself off the ocean and moved inland to Boksburg, an old mining town which is now also a general industrial area, just outside of Johannesburg. (I guess Johannesburg itself is an old mining town - the evidence being the mine dumps gracing the side of the M2 highway - but it's now grown into the largest city in SA.) Somewhere in between I visited a friend who was living in Secunda and working for a large petrochemical company. I drove there from Jo'burg with a fellow femgineer friend who had also opted out of hard core chem eng into FMCG. When we arrived there I felt like we were Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie leaving the big city for some hick town to film an episode of The Simple Life. The parking lot at any mall in Jo'burg was busier that the main street of this town. There was a flashing set of traffic lights that had been broken for so long it was one of the landmarks on the map my friend drew for us. Turn right at The Flashing Lights, no kidding. The locals sported 1980s farmer-style two-toned shirts. And instead of having a view of a mountain wherever you were, you had a view – and the stench - of the vast plant flaring away like a grotesque birthday cake.

Having said that, I suppose living in Boksburg - which I did for three years - was not much better. Two-toned shirts? Check! Mullets? Check! Mine dumps? Check, check, check! After some time I had started to fantasize that the mine dumps on the horizon were actually beautiful, majestic mountains. In fact, by the time I left Boksburg, I had to remind myself that they were mine dumps and not mountains. I guess my coastal brain had finally short-circuited after being too high above sea level for so long.

I wish I could say that all is now well and I spend my days mountain-gazing, sipping mocktails and breathing in sea air. But even though I’m living in Cape Town again I still spend most of my time working in Johannesburg right now.

And these days the mine dumps... just look like mine dumps.

PPE Part 1: Net Worth

PPE stands for Personal Protection Equipment (and Philosophy, Politics and Economics, but not on this blog). PPE, as the name suggests, is meant to protect you from injury and long-term damage to your senses as a result of exposure to operational health and safety risks. As a female engineer, it also protects you from flattery and compliments, and can cause long-term damage to your sense of femininity and style if you’re not vigilant. This is part 1 in a series (unless I get bored after Part 1) of posts dedicated to the joys of wearing PPE.


I have a confession: Although I mention hard hats in the title of this blog, I must admit I’ve hardly ever worn one in my career. As a student I wore a hard hat once during a site visit to a petro-chemical plant. The only other time I needed one was for a few months when a section of the washing powder factory I worked in was under construction. Hard hats are not too bad. I actually think they’re kind of hot in a tom-boy sort of way. (And its fun to knock yourself on the head with your fist when you’re wearing one because you don’t feel anything and you hear that hollow sound from inside the hat. If you’ve ever worn one, you must’ve done that at least once. Or is it just me?...) The only drawback is hard hat-hair. If you have big hair, guaranteed it’ll be flattened after an hour or so of wearing one.




Hairnets on the other hand… Hairnets just look ridiculous. And “hairnets and heels” just doesn’t sound as catchy. They don’t hurt, or itch or make you sweat but I just hate them. I had the misfortune of spending the greater part of last year wearing a hairnet. I worked in a margarine factory and understandably human hair is the last thing consumers would like to find buried in their tubs of low fat spread. Well, actually the last thing is probably a cockroach… But even if you’re bald, upon entry to the plant you pull on a hairnet.

Fine. But I still hate them. I hope I never wear another hairnet in my lifetime.

Now would be a good time to reveal my ethnicity as it may help to contextualise my specific disdain for hairnets. I am a coloured** woman from Cape Town. Cape Town is home to, and famous for, it’s many fisheries and fish shops. Many coloured women work in fish shops and they all wear hairnets. I think the first time I ever saw a hairnet was on the head of a woman who worked in a fish shop. I associate hairnets with working in fish shops. For years I strived to get good grades so that I could go to university, get a degree and a good job so that I would not be a woman in a fish shop. Or a cashier at Shoprite. Or a factory worker, bad as that may sound. Yes, I guess that makes me a snob. And yes, I see the irony that I ended up in a factory anyway. Wearing a hairnet.


Consolatory PPE perks: Hairnets are excellent for masking a bad hair day. On a good hair day they do not cause the same degree of damage as hard hats.

Alternative uses: I know of two: (1) Socks. I worked at a personal care products factory (shampoo, lotion, deodorants) where all staff were meant to wear hairnets. Instead we were issued with baseball caps because management realised they were spending way more than anticipated on replenishing hairnets. Why? The operators were wearing them as socks. Secret socks. The secret being that they were stealing PPE to save… what? Money on washing powder? (2) Food cover. My mom uses hairnets to cover dishes of food when there are flies around. Unused hairnets, by the way. My aunt is a QA (Quality Assurance) manager at a food products manufacturing factory, and she provides them to the women in my family for this purpose. I’m not sure if management knows.

**For the non-South African readers: Please note that in South Africa “coloured” is a legitimate label for people of mixed racial origin and most people do not view it as any more as offensive than the terms “black” and “white”. The coloured population is considered to be previously disadvantaged as a result of the Apartheid system. Levels of affluence have been on the rise since the end of Apartheid but many communities are still impoverished and suffering the social effects of forced removals of the previous era.

Good morning, Charlie

Have you ever watched Charlie's Angels? Personally I've never seen the series but I loved the movies. Three super strong, super sexy women kicking villain ass in killer stilettos and cute outfits, all without smudging their eyeliner. Going undercover and somehow pulling mad skills out of the hat to fit whichever seductive persona they assume. Stealthily sneaking into highly secure vaults and pulling off Chinese Olympian gymnast moves to manoeuvre through spider webs of alarm beams. That scene in the first Charlie's Angels movie when they've designed gloves and contact lenses with duplicate finger and retina prints so Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz's characters can break into the vault? I wanted to be them!!

Unfortunately for me I think working for a bank is the closest I'll ever get to being like an Angel.

Let me explain.

Firstly, being an engineer from a manufacturing background, I was hired as a Business Efficiency Manager to streamline processes and make bank operations more productive. I know it's a stretch of the imagination, but isn't that kind of like that scene where Lucy Liu's character goes undercover into that software engineering company as an efficiency expert? You know the one where she's wearing that black leather pencil skirt outfit and she keeps hitting people with her pointer? Yeah, like I said, it's a stretch but the thought cheers me up when I feel like my job is boring.

Secondly, I often spend half my day in a room alone talking to a speaker phone. (If I need to explain the connection, you have clearly not watched Charlie's Angels and should stop reading this and go out and rent it immediately.) Since my role is national and I can only be in one cash centre at a time, I spend a lot of time in tele-conferences with various people across the country. Not quite the same as discussing instructions for my next mission, but humour me.

Thirdly, I don't just work for a bank. I work for the bulk cash handling division of a bank. So my world is not your cheerful local branch one floor down from the Woolies in the mall. My world is the bulk cash centre. The bank's equivalent of a factory. Think rows and rows of high-speed machines counting bills faster than the eye can keep track of. This is where the cash that you spent at the Woolies one floor up from the bank's branch in the mall ends up. From the retail cashier's till point, to the store's back cash office, to the bank's bulk cash centre. Needless to say there are large amounts of moola in these buildings. And where there is lots of cash, there tends to be lots of potential for robberies. And where there is lots of potential for robberies, there tends to be lots of security. Basically I work in a big old vault. The front door is a hefty bullet-proof, drill-proof, fire-proof, chivalry-proof affair which is programmed to remain open for mere seconds at a time. (No gentleman will be holding that open for me. Ever. ) So my daily dose of stealth is trying to slip through it with my lunch box and my laptop bag before it smacks me on the behind. Glamorous. There are a few more security hurdles to jump before I can get my hands on my morning cup of tea (everything short of a cavity search). But if I tell you more I'll have to kill you. See? That's a little bit undercover agent-ish, isn't it? No?

Well, at least this little fantasy makes my work day a bit more fun. A private joke between me and... well, me. Now if only I could convince my boss to let me call him Charlie...

Blame it on FIFA

I'm not sure how many people are reading my blog at this point. But for those three or four of you who got used to weekly instalments, I'm sorry for the silence over the last three weeks. Being a proud SAffer (South African) I was fully infected with FIFA World Cup fever. It was freaking awesome having the spotlight on my country for something good for a change!! In between I also took a few days off to sneak out of the city to Knysna forest and hide out in front of a fireplace with a good book. I took time away from the good book to watch the good football (well I don't know if it was good, but some of the commentators said so).

But I am back! So please keep reading.

The Other Woman

A few minutes after publishing my first post a few weeks ago, I immediately Googled “Femgineer” expecting to see my blog at the top of the list. Shock, horror! There was already someone out there calling herself Femgineer. Someone by the name of “Poornima Vijayashanker”, a software engineer in the States. So sadly, I can’t claim to be the first to use this word, even though I naively thought I was. And I discovered last week, on another Google-spree that there are a few other blogs out there dedicated to femgineering.

With my bubble nearly burst, I tried one last-ditch attempt to affirm my originality and typed in Femgineer Fatale. This site came up at the top! At least I’m the first to use this title…

Oh, so you like… work in a lab?

I am not a chemist. I do not work in a laboratory. In fact, I hate lab work. I have a scar on the palm of my right hand from a first-year varsity pipette-related incident - that led to stitches - serving as a constant reminder of how much I hate lab work. The last time I worked in a lab was in second year during Chemistry practicals and I detested every second. And yet, when I tell people that I am a chemical engineer, the first question is most often: “Oh, so you like… work in a lab?” Um, no. But thanks for playing.

It struck me when talking to fellow blogger and friend, Dr S (Dr as in Dr, not Dr as in PhD), that many bright, otherwise socially-acceptable people out there have no idea what engineers actually do. Since none of you reading this are probably bright-eyed, eager-beaver high-school students wondering what soul-destroying career to dedicate your life to, I will keep it simple. In the purest form of all disciplines, engineers design. Mechanical engineers design mechanical systems, engines, gears. Electrical engineers design electrical systems, efficient electrical distribution, power plants. Civil engineers design roads, bridges, towns. Industrial engineers design work environments. Chemical engineers design chemical processes, select the suitable type of tanks, mixers, heat exchangers, pipes, pumps involved in the process and specify the right sizes. We are also held responsible for not damaging the environment or killing any staff in the process (explosions, electrocutions, etc) and not spending a cent more than required. And almost always a fellow engineer manages the labour who builds or runs the operations we design, or manages the maintenance team maintaining the technology. I heard a quote on a National Geographic or Discovery Channel documentary that explained engineering aptly. It went something like: “People think engineers are there to build things as big, thick and strong as possible when actually their role is to keep trying to do more with less and strip excesses away until just shy of the breaking point.”

That is what we are meant to do, anyway. In practice we end up in banking.

“But that’s men’s work, my girl!”

Ten years ago, as a short, skinny 16 year-old grade 12 student I threw on my jeans and sneakers, plaited my long, brown, shiny schoolgirl hair in an attempt to look neat, and hopped into my mom’s car to be driven off to my first job- shadowing assignment. My uncle, a floor supervisor at a textiles factory, had organised for me to trail a mechanical engineer in the maintenance department for the day. This man, an elderly Scotsman - who in hindsight was rather sexist and persistently called me “my dear” in a condescending tone - showed me around the plant. He took me on a tiring steam line tracing expedition through a maze of pipe lines, gave me a tour of the maintenance workshop, showed me some dusty, rusty vessel which he was scheduled to climb into and inspect the next day and led me climbing up every dizzyingly steep cat-ladder to reach every nauseatingly high platform we came across. I think his objective was to put me – aka “my dear” - off a career in engineering, but I had my brave face on. I wanted to prove that I could handle it, and I’d be damned if I’d show him how much he’d freaked me out. That was my first less-than-subtle taste of the frat party I was about to gatecrash. The invite read “BYOB”: bring your own balls, and I was precisely two short! Perhaps it was partly the brush with this mechanical engineer which steered me towards the more girl-friendly world of chemical engineering.



In my experience there is always a hint of gender rivalry between male and female engineers. Well sometimes more than just a hint. It starts at varsity. There’s an awareness of how many male students there are versus female students in each discipline (chemical, mechanical, electrical, civil and industrial) and how each group fares academically versus the other. In my case, the ChemEng (chemical engineering) class intake was split almost 50/50 for my year. There was subtle competition around which sex was doing better at grasping the concepts, scoring well at tests, asking intelligent questions in lectures... (Now would be a good time to mention that there was always a girl at the top of my class at year end. No, unfortunately that girl wasn’t me!) And this rivalry continues in the working world. I was fortunate enough to work as an engineer in a company where gender diversity was valued! Well officially it was valued. In practice this policy got lost in translation here and there. Here and there being my particular department. In my first role as an engineer, I worked for an extremely old-fashioned, middle-aged man who clearly didn’t think engineering was a suitable field for a woman. As a result, my male counterpart got assigned to every significant, exciting project requiring design work and detailed engineering calculations while I got assigned to mundane quality control problem solving and organising our office. I’m sure he would have had me make him tea and shine his shoes if he could have. How fun for me… There seems to be an implicit trust placed in male engineers by other male engineers without a requirement for evidence to support their confidence. Femgineers on the other hand, are viewed with a degree of scepticism and have to work much harder to gain the same credibility, particularly from older engineers. Luckily for me I eventually got some decent work passed my way, and at last even got a “Well done” out of the same boss for some of the projects I had done.



For the last leg of my job-shadowing day Mr McSexist took me to the welding workshop. I spent about an hour with a guy who passionately articulated his opinions on how the world would fall apart without the art of welding. Literally. He actually let me weld something, which I thought was very exciting! There was no condescension, no arrogance or negativity. This gentleman made me feel welcome in his world. By the end of the day, despite the damper the Scotsman had tried to place on me, I was excited to have seen this new territory where no day was ever the same. I felt inspired by the possible thrills and challenges it could present. I thought I could conquer it! Screw the Scotsman and all others like him! I had the brains to tackle engineering and I wanted in! My mom picked me up, little welded-plate-souvenir in hand, jeans filthy and long plait beginning to unravel. Back home I related the adventures of the day to her and my grandmother. Upon hearing this, my gran cocked her head to one side, gave me a puzzled look and said, “Is that really what you want to do, my child?” To which I replied, “Yes, I think so, Granny!”. And my gran said, as she shook her head in disbelief, “But that’s men’s work, my girl!”.

The Femgineer

**I wrote most of this while I was still working in manufacturing. Time will tell how much of it will hold true in the Banking world.**


As I said in my first post, Femgineer is my nickname for my work persona. She’s oh-so-together, smooth, calm, professional, no-nonsense, tough. I even have a special voice for her, a little deeper than my own. She’s a little bitchy, all about delivery, oh-so-un-feminine in her scuffed steel-toed safety shoes, stained and faded jeans, acid proof overall and ear-plugs. She scales up cat-ladders (100% vertical, narrow, steel ladders) and walks boldly across shaky platforms as if the plant is her industrial playground. She doesn’t hesitate to get her hands - and hair - dirty and swears like a Jerry Springer Show guest to let you know she’s one of the guys. She asks intelligent, probing questions so that you’ll think she knows what she’s doing... So that you’ll think she cares what the hell you’re talking about!


Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a total fake at work. I get a kick out of designing things and seeing them work. I get a kick out of learning how things function, out of learning these traditionally “guy things”. I have my good Femgineer moments when I feel like a real engineer and I feel proud to be one. And even more proud when I’m the only woman around the board room table, not only holding my own, but chairing the design lock, safety study or commissioning meeting. I have my Femgineer victory dance moments, but they’re rather few and all too far between. And I usually have to take them in the Ladies room.


It pays the bills and sometimes it’s fun, but this whole Engineer thing is not totally me. It requires a bit of a masquerade from me to get by….


On a bad day, it requires me to feign interest in pump specifications, piping and instrumentation diagrams and pH control problems when I have PMS and really just want to take a big old nap. On a good day, I feel genuinely interested in verifying the bulk density of the soon-to-be launched washing powder, or calculating the cooling capacity of the refrigeration plant. I just have to pretend that I enjoy wearing safety boots.


And almost daily, it requires me to know how to smile through the innuendo and inappropriate comments - from operators and old-school engineers - that border on sexual harassment because it’s faster than kicking up a fuss. I’ve finely honed the skill of smiling whilst thinking: “You f***ing piece of disgust. Just place the f***ing order, draw the f***ing drawing, make the f***ing call without staring at my miniscule boobs which I’ve tried to hide under this unflattering, oversized T-shirt. Good god, man! I didn’t even wash my face today! How bad can your wife be?” Smile, grin, grit my teeth. It all becomes one thing. It’s a disposable smile. As soon as my back’s turned, I peel it off and drop it in the trash. But I have enough stocked up to last the day. Like tissues… and tampons.


And then - once in a while - there are really inspiring days when a problem I’ve been trying to solve for an eternity finally clicks into place or some or other piece of equipment I need to commission finally gets hauled into place, switched on and the design delivers what it’s meant to right off the bat. And then I get home, peel off my dirty jeans and two-sizes-too-big work t-shirt, wash the dust out of my hair and sink into the sofa feeling the euphoria of accomplishment.


Feeling passionate about what I do!! Feeling intelligent and competent!


Feeling victorious.


Until tomorrow…

Intro

As the title of this blog implies, I am a female engineer. A 26 year old, South African female chemical engineer to be specific. Since working-crying-praying my way to graduation, I have worked in South Africa’s Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry (FMCG companies manufacture and market detergents, toiletries, food products, etc) for five years, mostly practicing as an engineer. I have recently moved into the less technically - but more fashionably - challenging Banking sector to bring some industrial savvy to the rusty cogs turning behind the scenes of catchy slogans and smiling tellers that you see in TV adverts.


The word Femgineer started as a nickname for my own work persona. I am of the opinion that the female engineer, the Femgineer, is a distinctive subset of my gender. I’m not sure if we’re drawn to engineering because of who we are, or if we end up in engineering by mistake and it makes us who we are. But we are a bit… different.


Maybe a lot of what I have to say about us is applicable to female lawyers, doctors or businesswomen as well. All I know is, the experiences that women in engineering endure, the awful things that we have to wear, the amount of chemicals, voltage, radiation, grease and blue collar sexual bravado that we are exposed to, combined with the generic feminine hormonal concoction that is infused in our blood leads to some interesting results, and hopefully some interesting stories. None of them fatal or particularly sexy… I just wanted a catchy title.