In South Africa, for some crimes, the right to institute criminal proceedings lapses 20 years from the time the offence was committed.
And so I am going to tell you about some of the things I did 20 years ago. They are not crimes, let me add – just things I did.

I worked with a guy called B. He was a hard-working technician who later became a hard-working engineer. B and I worked on a refinery. Our job was to get projects completed as requested by the refinery operator. The refinery was owned by Americans and they were crazy about project management and control. If you said that something would be finished on a certain day, then, by golly, it better be finished. If you said that the work would cost a certain sum of money, then, by golly, you had better make sure you did not go over budget, even just a little bit.

This was difficult for B and me because South African conditions are, after all, South African conditions. After transgressing the rules a few times and earning the wrath of the American project managers, B had a little discussion with me, the engineer. He pointed out that the Americans had no idea what electrical stuff should cost. He also pointed out to me that, if we gave an electrical contractor a really lucrative contract with the stipulation that it had to be completed on time and within budget, then, provided the budget was huge enough, everything was possible.

So, we used to take the cost estimate and double it and tell the project manager that was the budget. All good. We would then get tenders in and, one by one, ask the contractors to attend a bid clarification meeting at which we would ask them to submit additional prices, which would bump the tender price up. The contractors now had very lucrative contracts and we said, okay, here is the work – just invoice whenever you want to and we will get the invoice passed and paid in a week. Made in heaven. Only, we said, make sure you complete the work on time.

Thus, like magic, B and I became heroes. Every one of our contracts was within budget and on time and of a good quality. The Yanks held us up as shining examples of how it should be done. Us dogs.

Nathan and I worked on the Cavendish Square redevelopment in 1998. When the building was handed over for shop-fitting, Nathan and his crew had to supply temporary power to the shopfitters. Every day, they would run hundreds of metres of cable and socket outlets and, every night, the cable and socket outlets would be stolen. So, we invented Tox metal halide and nonimpregnated dielectric cable. The abbreviation for this was TMH and ND, which, oddly enough, are my and Nathan’s initials.

We bought some (a few hundred metres) of braided shielded coax cable and spray-painted it bright green. We wound it on a drum and put a sign on the drum: “Warning! Tox metal halide and nonimpregnated dielectric! Poison gas! Do not cut without special tools!”

Nathan and his crew laid the cable down for the temporary power supplies. At intervals along the cable, we had warning signs. No one stole it. After two days, we bandaged one of Nathan’s guys all around his head and led him through all the crew on site while he gave a realistic impersonation of being gassed. No one stole it after that.

Last story: on a different site, theft of tools reached epidemic proportions. Koos Louw, the site foreman, put up a sign which read: “Anybody stealing tools will be beaten up and fired.” Not much happened until the workers noted that, every so often, somebody would be dragged to Koos’s office, only to emerge covered in blood and scarcely able to walk. Tool theft stopped. At the end-of-contract braai, the architect asked Koos if any of those beaten up had taken legal action. It turned out they had not – they were all actors hired by Koos’s wife, who, before she got married, was a makeup artist, specialising in vivid stage makeup effects.