There Goes the Species
My company just gained our BS13485 accreditation… and there was much rejoicing. There is a reason I mention this but it isn’t, in all honesty, a very good one.
It occurred to me, as one of my colleagues was appointed to make sure that our calipers were always properly calibrated, that we have come an awfully long way from the first moment that man invented tools. I’m not even criticising it: we work in medical device design, so the traceability and rigour of these sorts of standards is actually fairly self-evidently important.
It’s more the surreality of the whole thing, I suppose. A few thousand years ago: man with a bit of stick. Today: calibrated calipers. I can’t imagine that the first human users of tools could ever have imagined the kind of crazy explosion that they were initiating.
And of course, I know they weren’t ‘initiating’ anything, because while we look at history in a narrative fashion and evolution as something being done by an entire species, that’s just not accurate. It’s more like an aggregated collection of the behaviours of individual animals, but it’s sort of funny to look back on it as if we had some sort of collective plan.
“If I just get this right, within the blink of a geological eye my grandsons and granddaughters will know the unparalled privilege of performing their work with the aid of some finely and carefully calibrated calipers.”
Dave Bartholomew – The Monkey Speaks His Mind
It’s interesting to wonder what uses he could imagine for that first stick he picked up.
“Hmmm… If I just attach a few inches of fluffy feathers to one end, I’ll be able to dust all those horrid cobwebs down from the coving in the cave…”
Surely that would have been a ‘she’, Dylan?
*ducks for cover*
I didn’t realise they still had BS accreditations! I thought it had all transferred to the ISO prefix. Hell, it’s been a long time since I was a QA/Best Practice manager…
Way, way back in the early ’90s I was working for The Welsh Office (now The Welsh Assembly), in the Welsh arm of the DTI (in the Diplomatic Liaison Dept.) & we were the first non-commercial/Government department/office/whatever to gain a BS accreditation in the UK. As a result we were graced with an official visit/commendation by the then PM John Major.
The ceremony was to take place at 10am, with him arriving to red carpet fanfare about 9.30am – all the WO staff were lined in the courtyard, the reception rooms, overhanging on the mezzanine walkways, etc., waiting for him to arrive. ‘Course, I was late & strolled in screamingly hungover at 9.25am, through the cordons & up the carpet, up the central stairwell to join my disdainful colleagues.
Because our dept. + the International Business dept. + one other were instrumental in the administration & auditing of the whole thing we were granted a meet & greet/shake-n-bake with him & the then DTI head & Home Secretary.
He was a terribly spineless, wet fart/child’s handshake of a ‘man’ – &, cliche acknowledged but very accurate nonetheless, a transparent ganeamic wisp of grey smoke.
I don’t recall if I said anything when I had to shake his hand, but he did say in his well done, puppets speech something like ‘you’ve set a precedent for Quality Assurance to come’.
I can only apologise to anyone who’ve been caught up in the build up, deluge & wake of hours & hours & hours of pre & post audit trails ever since.
…there goes the blog, as well, or so it would seem. 4 days, man. Longer than Woodstock. Where’s the love?
How do you actually get elected with so little charisma? I always assumed that even wet blankets like him would actually have to be really magnetic in person because how the hell else do you motivate the machinery to jump aboard your bandwagon?
Blair may have been a sociopath, but he was at least a charismatic personality to some degree.