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Just havin’ fun

20th October 2017

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

     

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Oh, woe to all of you who are married to engineers. Engineers are generally useful people to have around. But, when watching TV, if something is shown that is not correct engineeringwise, the engineer will snort and launch into a detailed explanation as to why the TV is wrong. You want to scream: “Who cares! Who cares if you can’t get fingerprints off the cat’s tail? It’s a story!”

But there are some adverts that take the cake. Here are two of them.

Nissan Navara. This is a 30 second ad. Four Nissan Navara bakkies drive through an industrial wasteland. They pass a group kicking a football around. We see a man using a concrete cutter to cut slots into the plaster brickwall of a derelict building. They hook a Navara up to an eyebolt in the wall and it comes crashing down to form an access way into the building. We see concrete blocks flying and a driver who is not wearing safety glasses. Then they take a cable from the tow hitch of one Navara and pass it behind a steel-reinforced concrete column to the tow hitch of another Navara. The two bakkies speed off, the training cable slicing through column after column, which, naturally causes the roof structure to fracture and rain down into the building, narrowly missing people and the bakkies below. Finally, we see a long shot of 15 people playing soccer in the now roofless building, while the building rafters sway unsupported from the equally unsupported walls.

The message is, I think, that the Navara is one tough bakkie and you can use it to demolish a building. There should be another message: do not try this. Ever.

The use of the Navara tow hitch to pull down masonry is ridiculous. The tow hitch is for towing boats and trailers and stuff – it would never take the strain of pulling down masonry or slicing columns. And all that the four Navaras have done is to make a building that was marginally safe even less safe. Just to play soccer, which they could have played outside, anyway. Huh.

Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), which is French for ‘Doctors Without Borders’, an international nongovernmental organisation that provides voluntary medical services for countries that have poor medical facilities. The MSF ad is also 30 seconds long. A boy with a fever is being transported at speed to a clinic. The vehicle is a sports utility vehicle, perhaps a Mercedes-Benz. At the clinic, he is carried rapidly to an operating theatre. A drip is set up. As things seem to begin, suddenly, the clinic lights go off. We see the scared face of the child. Cut to a man watching TV who SMSes an agreement to donate R15 a month to MSF. There is a whine and the clinic lights go on again.

This ad has me full of questions. Why are they operating on a boy with a sweating fever? Does he have appendicitis? If so, surely, they would confirm by X-ray. Why is he in for surgery? In the advert, the operating theatre is filthy. The walls are brown and muddy. Do they seriously operate in such conditions?

The theatre light is a bulb, so it is not a real theatre light. If fact, it is dangerous, since it could ignite medical gases. Why do the doctors not anticipate a loss of electricity? A simple headlamp would do. Why do they even operate when there is no backup power? Or a car headlight hooked up to a battery. Why risk the child’s life?

Oh, I anticipate correspondence from doctors who will tell me of the time they had to deliver babies by the light of a gas lighter. But this is not childbirth, is it? And why is there a whine when the power goes on? Is the clinic powered by a gas turbine? Oh, I know, all engineering questions. But I wish they would get it right. And, in fact, MSF does a magnificent job. My only deep wish is that African countries would get it right so that MSF would not be necessary. Never going to happen.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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