Week 12- The Fat Controller

We’re sucking diesel now anyway. The wind turbine project is making good progress, the open frisbee season is kicking off and the weather is warming up. My Monday started with finishing off an assignment. I was close to being finished when I received an email at 10:45am from the lab technician saying that the previous group had finished on the laser cutter and that if I was at her office at 11 I could use the cutter. I messaged my group to see if anyone could be there but I was not the only one finishing off the assignment! I had to quickly grab my lunch and hop on the bike to fly to the lab. I just about made it, though perhaps a little warm, and we (I) successfully recut the correct foil design. I then fully finished the assignment before I came to a lecture on ethics in engineering. Cue lesson of the week.

After being told all about the code of ethics that was produced by Engineering New Zealand we were presented with the following scenario: You are employed by a company to study a company’s manufacturing waste discharge in order to seek a permit to discharge. Your study concludes that the discharge from the plant will violate environmental standards and that the corrective action will be very costly. You verbally notify the company, which immediately terminates your contract, with full payment for the services performed. It instructs you not to submit a written report to the corporation. Your contract contained a confidentiality obligation. A short time later, you learn that the relevant authority has called a public hearing, where the company will present data to support its claim that the present plant discharge meets minimum standards. What do you do?

The lecturer, who is a member of Engineering New Zealand, having listened to some responses, claimed to not know the correct answer. He did suggest that rather than spending hours combing through a code of ethics, it’d be worth-while asking more senior engineers in the company for their advice and expertise. In short, stand on the shoulders of giants and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Monday still wasn’t finished at this point. I had time to go to the gym, attend afternoon tea and then go to a study abroad student society table quiz. I was fortunate enough to be on a team, which we named the Quizards, with a rather brilliant guy from California. He answered most of the questions that the rest of us didn’t know. I did provide some useful answers, mostly in the sport round, with two gems in the first and last round. The first being what type of animal is a chamois? It’s a mountain goat. And who is Thomas the Tank Engine’s boss? It’s the Fat Controller of course! What does this say about me? In the end, Quizards ran out comfortable winners.

The hump of the week was mostly spent playing frisbee with one day of University training and two days of open club trials for a team called Groot. I felt I played very well at the trials so hopefully it will be good news. I also found out that I would be going to the Canoe Club club championships at the weekend (More details later). Charlotte has begun a no waste initiative but was struggling to decide how to deal with her banana peels. I suggested blending them (which she tried and used with her porridge) but she also tried cutting them up and putting them in pickle juice. The jury is still out as to whether that will be a success. By Chance, I was introduced to one of my lecturer’s sons, Matt, on Thursday and after establishing that his dad was my lecturer I asked him if he ever told stories about his classes. Low and behold, Matt had been told about one group (us) who had their foils completely wrong!

Thankfully that is no longer the case and construction began in earnest on Friday. I was in the lab gluing away from 9-3. The actual gluing was frighteningly quick, with the baking soda making the super glue dry almost instantly, but we had quite a lot of parts to join. We managed to assemble four of the six blades before we sent one of the guys to buy more super glue. He duly went and returned with the same brand of glue, only to discover that all six tubes were empty! As we didn’t have time to get more glue, that was where construction ended for the week and I headed home to get ready to leave for my weekend with the Canoe Club.