With the advent of Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, apps and connectivity, there has arrived, in full flower, the inability of younger people (below 30 years of age) to proofread a document or drawing to establish that the work they have done is correct.

Back in the day (as they say) in engineering, we had two certain mechanisms to make sure we did our work correctly. These were the person who typed out the documents and the senior draughtsperson.

There were no computers (none, as in none) – a document was written out by the engineer and typed out by the typist. Drawings were dawn in pencil by the engineer and then drawn out by the draughtsperson or tracer. The chief draughtsperson in our office was Adrian Stringer. He was a very pleasant man who collected stamps and had a tongue which could, and did, drip acid over my drawing attempts.

If I left out a dimension on a drawing, he would ask me if, perhaps, in the absence of this information, it would be handled by the person in charge of the contractor’s ‘guessing department’.

If I made a note that “lighting layout dimensions to be as per notes attached” and the notes were not attached, he would enquire sweetly to what, actually, were the “notes” attached? To the ceiling, perhaps?

Even worse, all drawings were done, in those days, on a plastic film sheet. Ink was used to draw. Ink could be erased but it was a tedious process. Thus, when the ink drawing was made from the pencil, it would be best if there were no errors in the pencil drawing since, if detected after the ink drawing was done, it was a big job to do corrections. If I plotted sagging curves for a power line and then changed them, the whole of the line spans on the drawing had to be moved. Stringer would shake his head and mutter: “Oh, dear! Oh, dear, dear, dear! Oh, my dear . . . ”

I learned to draw accurately. Our typing was done by Enid Crossley. She was not sarcastic but, even worse, was resigned to the fact that I would make mistakes and that whole letters and documents sometimes had to be retyped. She performed the valuable function of checking the spelling and grammar of all letters and documents while typing them and, thus, would quietly embarrass the engineers by pointing out some of the more significant mistakes: “Do you mean ‘noose levels must not exceed 65 dBA’ or is it ‘noise’ for ‘noose’ ? Just asking . . .”

It has all changed. As principal engineer in my practice, I perform the function of checker of drawings and spelling and grammar. My male engineering staff cannot check their work for toffee. This hardly matters since the documentation we get is from others and is so hideously wrong that it is a waste of the trees of this planet to print it out.

I was sent a tender where the contractor stated that “a buzz prediction scheme will be included in the offer”. I bet it would. When I taxed him about it, he blamed his secretary. Neat. Wun wunders wot kare he would take in seting the bias curent trip seteng. This is the nub: How much can you trust the design of a thing or the contents of a report when the writer cannot get the spelling and grammar correct – in these days, when spelling errors are underlined in red and grammar in green?

On the wall of my office is the blueprint for an aircraft. It is for an SE 5A, which flew in 1917. The drawing has a title, a revision box, the name of the draughtsperson who drew it, the name of the person who checked it, a drawing number, an issue date and a revision date, a scale, a key diagram and notes. From 1917. In 2013, you get about half that – if you’re lucky. Why? It is a simple addiction by the young to the world of the facile: computer games, smartphones, apps. Simple things which keep simple minds . . . simple.