Exacting like ..? 16 3 2 (16) 25 1 19

I don't know what really attracted me to become a professional chemist but I was no good at woodwork in school unlike my father who was a Pattern Maker or my older brother who produced a Coffee Table constructed from a special oak timber whereas the fanciest thing I ever produced was a shaky Towel Rail made from the more common Red Deal... My brother when he left Technical School in turns became a Fitter, a Tool Maker then an Engineering Draughtsman before settling on a career as a Lecturer of Mechanical Engineering subjects.

In fairness to my technical skills during metalwork classes one year I took the metalwork prize and, though I fashioned a wrought iron stool to my own design on the anvil of our forge, perhaps burning one of my eyes with a scale of flying hot metal quenched a sustained interest in engineering subjects, and, though good at draughtsmanship, it was to the sciences of physics and chemistry I was somehow drawn...

As I have written before my first job was in the Chemistry and Physics laboratories of a Paper Mill which during the 5 years I was employed there introduced me to just about everything to do with paper-making  processes, and reasoning that I wasn't the cleverest kid on the block tried to perform all my duties according to the book without cutting corners, and in this way reduce the number of variables in any experiment I got engaged in..?

The very first time I worked in a Research and Development environment was over here in Scandinavia when as a summer job I got this start working for one of the biggest producers of wood pulps and paper products in their Central Laboratories: and where on one of the four such occasions I was so employed during the next 5 years spanning a total working period of 2 years it was one of the guys a colleague who accused me of being "Exacting like a pig..."

Nowadays of course we are told not to denigrate animals by comparing them to humans but as I watched recently in a video of a small pig inserting cut-outs of an even smaller pig into a sponge mat of the same material, containing the same cut-out shapes, the pig repeatedly got the thing right and didn't waste any time doing so, evidently enjoying the challenge to his or her intellect and not unhappily being given tasks normally reserved for human children...hahaha

The second back-handed compliment I got from another colleague, an old colleague from our Technical School, maybe 30 years on, when he likened me to a Bull Dog adding that when I get hold of a problem I never let go until I have pursued it to a solution. He was the General Manager of another Paper Mill at the time and as the R and D Manager of the Group comprising 3 such Paper Mills I had been entrusted with the job, as Project Coordinator, of restoring product quality for some Paper which one of his people had been instrumental in having returned as sub-standard, all 20 tons. And when my colleague rebuked me for riding this other guy, who refused to admit any wrong doing, I was likened to the bull dog… Not so surprising Management had to let this unrepentant guy go with a redundancy package some months later and some months later still I returned from one of my business trips to the USA with a 20 ton order of new paper to replace the rejected stock of 2 years earlier.

Well, all these things happened a long time ago and nowadays I content myself by keeping on top my wife’s and my kitchen, solicitously cleaning the cutlery and plates of their worst dried-on scraps of food before putting them into the dish washer, stacking the plates and stuff in a precise fashion to maximise space and washer utilisation, before transferring the washed dishes once the cycle has completed into our cupboards… and how in the words of the Chinese writer Xinran has it in one of her short stories: old people should have a space of their own in which to weave a beautiful old age for themselves… Have a good day everyone as I hope you are not put out by my political incorrectness comparing people to animals, hahaha?