Here’s a story for you: “There was a case in one hospital’s intensive- care ward where patients always died in the same bed, on Sunday morning at about 11:00, regardless of their medical condition. This puzzled the doctors. No one could solve the mystery . . . as to why the deaths occurred around 11:00 on Sundays.

“So a worldwide team of experts was assembled to investigate the cause of the incidents. The next Sunday morning, a few minutes before 11:00, all doctors and nurses nervously waited outside the ward to see for themselves what the terrible phenomenon was all about. Some were holding wooden crosses, prayer books and other holy objects to ward off the evil spirits. “Just when the clock struck 11:00, the part-time Sunday sweeper entered the ward and unplugged the life support system so that he could use the vacuum cleaner.”

Here is another story: “Electricians fixing a fault accidentally unplugged the main power source of the radar late on Friday, causing radar screens to go blank,” said the Times of India news- paper and other media.

Operations were shifted to manual control to assist the planes in the air and for those lined up for a take-off, the media said, quoting officials. No incidents were reported.

“Though the standby power took over the system within seconds, it took over 45 minutes to reboot all consoles and restore the operations fully,” officials told India’s NDTV network.

So, is it all true? The first story gets 270 000 hits on Google and is complete rubbish. I have designed power systems for life support systems and there is no way that some person could just unplug them without setting off many alarm bells. The second story is also rubbish – it implies that the radar systems are not on uninterruptible power supply and that you can, in fact, interrupt the power by unplugging something. In fact, modern control radars at airports are frequently backed up ‘on line’ and can ‘reboot’ quite quickly.

The first story is often attributed to a hospital in South Africa, while the second allegedly occurred in India.

I wonder why these sorts of stories arise. I think it is because the rest of the word regards the Third World as being slightly stupid. There is a sense of triumph in pointing out how stupid we are, particularly with regard to engineering systems.

Now, in a way, it is all true. Nobody in his or her right mind wants to hire a car and drive on the roads of the Republic of Congo, India, Kenya or Umtata. Where there was once infrastructure there is now no more.

In Nairobi, you have to get up at 4:00 to get to the airport by 7:00, and it is not more than 10 km away – just that it is 10 km of traffic hopelessly snarled on bad roads.

In the Republic of Congo, some of the roads in Pointe Noire are crossed by potholes the depth of tank traps. The Third World has a different set of expectations with regard to politicians. If roads are not repaired, if hospital sheets are stolen, hospitals are dirty and inefficient, buildings are falling down, engineering systems not working . . . the Third World people do not care – they expect no more.

Most Third World politicians are like crayfish in a bucket – their heads are full of smelly stuff and they constantly crawl over one another and push one another down to get to the top. They are ruthlessly interested in themselves – not in their country. Nobody cares.

Further, a Third World engineer- ing project of any size has a long line of hands held out with palms to be greased. It happens all around and all the time. What ever is to be done I don’t know. But we should not expect that the mocking stories at the beginning of this column will go away. In many ways, the Third World is dof, corrupt and stupid, and we deserve such treatment.