Should kids who are hopeless at team sports and hate PE lessons at school be engineers?

Hi David,

Me too!!!!!! Which also means I tend to be sunk when landed in a room full of blokes, as I know absolutely nothing about football or F1 - which in turn can sometimes become a challenge when working in some areas of UK engineering. Bring 4-10 random male engineers who don't know each other together for a meeting, and time how long the pre-meeting coffee conversation takes before one of these subjects comes up - I find it's usually pretty short. I'm sure there's been whole research papers written on "the role of football as a Lingua Franca in human male bonding rituals".

The only time I remember surviving (never mind excelling at) a team event when young was during the very brief time I was a Venture Scout. We were on a leadership training event, and when it was my turn we were faced with a fairly typical "get your team over this huge obstacle" challenge. So, not being my sort of challenge at all, I turned to the team and asked them how we were going to do it - apparently I was the only attendee in the whole weekend who thought of doing this. Actually I couldn't think of anything else to do. But the approach of the other trainee leaders probably says more about the typically mentality of 17 year old males who chose to be Venture Scouts in North London in the late 1970s than anything else.

As ever in answering these types of questions, what's an engineer????

Right, nearly late enough in the morning for me to be able to use power tools without feeling guitly about annoying the neighbours! 

Cheers, Andy

Hi David,

Me too!!!!!! Which also means I tend to be sunk when landed in a room full of blokes, as I know absolutely nothing about football or F1 - which in turn can sometimes become a challenge when working in some areas of UK engineering. Bring 4-10 random male engineers who don't know each other together for a meeting, and time how long the pre-meeting coffee conversation takes before one of these subjects comes up - I find it's usually pretty short. I'm sure there's been whole research papers written on "the role of football as a Lingua Franca in human male bonding rituals".

The only time I remember surviving (never mind excelling at) a team event when young was during the very brief time I was a Venture Scout. We were on a leadership training event, and when it was my turn we were faced with a fairly typical "get your team over this huge obstacle" challenge. So, not being my sort of challenge at all, I turned to the team and asked them how we were going to do it - apparently I was the only attendee in the whole weekend who thought of doing this. Actually I couldn't think of anything else to do. But the approach of the other trainee leaders probably says more about the typically mentality of 17 year old males who chose to be Venture Scouts in North London in the late 1970s than anything else.

As ever in answering these types of questions, what's an engineer????

Right, nearly late enough in the morning for me to be able to use power tools without feeling guitly about annoying the neighbours! 

Cheers, Andy