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.