One of the best architects I know worked for a fairly prominent architect some years ago.

He had been there for a month. At the end of the month, he received a salary slip and noticed that an amount of say, R25, had been deducted as ‘office refreshments’. He asked the accounting person about this and was told it was a deduction in respect of the coffee that he had drunk in the month. The coffee was good filter coffee and it seemed that he was expected to pay for drinking it. He left the office and did not come back.

Twenty years on, he has won numerous awards for architecture. I wonder what his former employer thinks. I raise the subject because, lately, I notice an increase in the appointment of people to management positions, where the people are engineers in the wrong place. They should be in engineering. This is management stupidity – similar to charging people for coffee supplied in the office.

However, it is set in deep and, whereas previously I used to be impressed by the ability of senior engineers and chief engineers of large electrical companies, I am no longer impressed at all. I used to phone up a large firm and ask, for example, to speak to the ‘transformer engineering department’. After not too long, I would be talking to a person who could answer the technical queries I had. No longer so. You phone them up and, after the mandatory five minutes of “your call is important to us” and Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (played in the wrong time, the wrong key and the wrong tempo), you get the operator, who is totally untrained and you get connected to the sales department. They connect you to the technical department, who say please email because the person who might answer the question is on leave, on site, or on training. Or phone back. I have generally phoned to get a quick answer and so I put the phone down.

I once reflected that, had I been put through to somebody who could answer my query, I would have steered an order worth millions of rands to the firm concerned. Did not happen.

But the fact is that such large electrical firms are still in business and the question is: How so, if you can not phone them up and ask technical questions? A bit of investigation revealed the following: the moment anybody, be it a consulting engineer, government or municipality, has a technical query related to a potentially large electrical order, the salesperson from the large electrical firm will offer to fly them to some distant country – all expenses paid – where they can ask the experts all the questions they want to. It is a brave person that this does not influence their decisions in buying.

But there is also another matter. The highly experienced engineers ipso facto would have more than 35 years’ experience. This means that they would have been born, brought up, educated and worked in the previous government’s political arena; in short, they would be white. Maybe some black engineers have 35 years’ experience, but not many. Further, a black engineer with even 20 years’ experience would almost certainly be sucked into management and not into engineering. Thus, this leaves a vacuum; as the 35-year-experience engineers retire, there is nobody to replace them and nobody or few people to mentor young engineers.

After a while, the large electrical firms start to believe that it is not necessary even to have engineers – their job is to sell stuff that has been developed overseas and perhaps produced in this country. Thus, the class of people who used to have deep engineering knowledge of the product are no longer South African and often not resident in South Africa. This makes after-sales support poor. From my lofty perch of being an electrical engineer for 37 years, I have watched the slow but steady decrease of general engineering knowledge (in my case, electrical engineering knowledge) with sadness. There is nothing to do other than to reflect on this and wish it was not so.