A colleague, S, and I are working on a poster sesssion for a conference on our ebook usage - which apparently is very high for a university.
It's based on a survey we've been running but she now has 500+ results and I'm still at 120 or so - not for want of badgering my faculty to let me come and survey their students.
Anyway, I'd arranged with a lecturer to come and survey his 70 odd engineering students for just a few minutes at the start of a class today. Which was fine, except...
- the class was in the middle of our fortnightly library meeting that I always hate missing because I get volunteered for things
- of the 70 students only about 20 had turned up. The rest have evidently decided to take an early Easter break
- the academic involved wasn't even there but one of his colleagues was showing a video.
Despite having arranged the time, and despite having arrived a few minutes early, he was a few minutes into showing a 45/50 minute National Geographic program. So I was invited to sit through it.
I thought it would be something dull but worthy on mechanical engineering and there wasn't much point in returning to the office for 3 minutes so I decided to sit through it.
It turned out to be all about a Japan Air 747 crash in 1985 which killed over 500 people (and if I understood correctly is still the largest single such air disaster). It reconstructed the final half hour or so of flight and finished with the reasons for the crash. It was gripping and fascinating and harrowing. But the reconstruction and the 8 year old girl dying and the tragedy of much of the story left me wracked - not what I was expecting of a Friday morning!
Turns out that somewhat astoundingly 4 people actually survived. Just. And the reason? A previous repair being done incorrectly so that one line of rivets was doing the job of two. Panel blows out, destroys the tail and all the hydraulics, leaving the pilots with next to no control.
The (mostly young) students didn't seemed fazed by it - or by the implications of how vital their future jobs could be. At least if I make a mistake the worst that can happen is a book lies unread on a shelf or some such.
2 comments:
...the book lies unread by an engineering student who therefore fails to encounter a vital chapter on rivet maintenance, before getting recruited by British Airways...
Oh great.
Thank you for destroying my peace of mind for the rest of my working career.
:-)
Fair point though. Although in fairness to myself [he says clutching at straws] the error there is the student's rather than mine. In fact, arguably in that instance I'd been doing my job perfectly by having the book on the shelf. The 'mistake' would have been not to buy that book. Or to fail to teach/promote info retrieval skills sufficiently so it was indeed my fault they'd failed to encounter it.
Oh dear.... [spirals into a reflective self-absorbed vortex of worry over every action or inaction of the morning...]
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