In The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, the character Michael Henchard works in the mythical area of Wessex, in England, in the nineteenth century (that is, the 1800s, for those of you Natal graduates).

Henchard is a hay trusser. He gets drunk at a fair, fights with his wife and auctions her to a sailor for £5. The following morning (with a deep babalas), he is horrified by what he has done and so gives up drinking alcohol and becomes a successful grain merchant and town mayor. He takes a partner, a young Scotsman called Farfrae, and the business prospers.

Henchard does business by word of mouth. He will say I will do that, you do this, you will have it, I will have that. And he keeps to his word. No paperwork. His new partner, Farfrae, is not a businessperson in that sense and institutes a whole accounting system. We are not surprised when Henchard loses control, loses it and dies in poverty.

You can read the rest of this story on the Internet (or, why not, go mad and read the actual book, turn the pages and everything).

This week’s instalment of this column is about how the consulting engineering business has changed. It used to be that I would be given design work to do by somebody who chose to ask me and the contract would proceed. Then things changed. Government and other organisations decided that price and skin colour were more important than ability and, as a professional engineer, I was asked to give a price for work in competition with other people.

The people asking me to give the prices had (and have) no idea what they were doing and the people I had to give the prices in competition to were frequently not qualified engineers, and neither was this ever specified as a condition of the tender.

So, I found myself in the rather ludicrous position of being a qualified engineer having to bid against people who were not at all quali- fied for a service they could not provide at an amount cheaper than I could even operate on. How can they afford it? The cheap nonengineers just make sure that the contract is written in such a way that the contractor bears most of the responsibility for any construction work design, whereas, previously, this was the job of the consulting engineer.

This unhappy position persists to this day and the result is that consulting engineers cut their fees and put their most junior staff onto the job. This type of approach, asking professionals to bid on work, has its natural end – sooner or later, something will go terribly wrong.

There is a modern building in Cape Town which, if one of the transformers has a fault, will burn down. The ‘engineer’ did not specify that the winding temperature alarm or oil surge trip be wired up.

In other disciplines, some things have already gone terribly wrong. There are far more structural collapses of buildings than there have ever been before.

Even worse, in this system of bidding, if I am successful with the tender, the client asks for the following documents (if not asked for with the tender): a tax clearance certificate, a value- added tax registration certificate, a letter of good standing with the Compensation Commissioner, a skills development levy contribution, Unemployment Insurance Fund payments, medical certificates and other stuff, which we never used to have to submit before.

The clients have a whole staff of procurement department people who do nothing else but check up to make sure that you have submitted irrelevant documents to be on their vendor data base. They change the rules to suit themselves. We get requests for certificates and then they tell me we may not send a copy of the certificate – we must send the original. The original? Then we have to get another original. One per tender. This has pretty much nothing to do with engineering. Years back, consulting engineers were not allowed to offer fee proposals in competition. Years back, we just traded on reputation, not a raft of documents. The work was well done and the equipment, once installed, lasted for years. Not now.