Undeniable Fact: Quit monkeying around
Friday, October 20, 2006
In the early days of internal combustion engines, it was widely believed that they were far too dangerous to be worked on or maintained by humans. Instead, small monkeys were trained to diagnose and fix problems so that the human engineers could be kept safe. Even though better understanding of how engines work has led humans to fix them without fear of injury, the monkeys' primary tool - the monkey wrench - is still in use today.
4 Comments:
"were far to dangerous to" should be were far too dangerous to ....
Sorry, but you'll have to change that 102 (days without any errors) to a 1 now :(
That totally explains where the phrase, "Grease Monkey" came from.
Awesome! I learn new stuff every day.
In regard to the alleged error: it is actually more correct to say "to" in this case. Historically the words have been spelled the same and it is only by recent convention that the extra "o" is added. However, since this convention has been widely adopted, I have changed the post in order to avoid confusion.
Though the grammar was technically correct, I admit that it was an error in judgment on my part to use such an obscure grammatical construct, so I will reset the error counter. Kudos to sarcophangus for keeping me on my toes.
I think human engineers could have been used, if only because they seem so useless to me otherwise!
I was doing test cores in a gypsum mine where a chemical wash had stripped 4" of concrete off both sides of the support footings, which were originally 18" thick. A standand concrete core bit will go 14" - 16" deep before you have to crack the core to keep drilling.
I was 45 minutes out of town. I had a 1/2 hour safety orientation, and it was a good 45 minutes to an hour to go down the elevator shaft and to drive through the tunnels to the work location. It took several of us to convince the engineer not to send me back to our shop for a longer core bit because he couldn't comprehend that all that was left was 10" of concrete!
That was the first of many such encounters with these completely bonkers people, and to top it all off, now my cousin is in university to be one!
My brother and I both ponder, "Why would you want to go to school to become stupider?!" (But we're only kidding, of course)
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