The Expert

Published on Mar 23, 2014 by Lauris Beinerts
The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) (7:34)
Funny business meeting illustrating how hard it is for an engineer to fit into the corporate world! Written & Directed by Lauris Beinerts based on a short story "The Meeting" by Alexey Berezin.

A Personal Note
Many of you are going to look at this and chuckle at the absurdity. The seriousness here is that this actually happens. Every day. I have witnessed this. I have participated in meetings and watched this happen. While in one sense it's a question of communication, of finding a common ground between business and a technical area of expertise, in another sense, a more important sense, it's about people with a total lack of knowledge about certain subject matter who seem to be completely incapable of grasping the simple fact that they don't know what the hell they're talking about. But they keep talking. They persist. They don't get it but don't realise they don't get it. Two plus two doesn't equal five but they insist on having five as the answer. All without changing the problem.

Is it some sort of psychological phenomenon that people want to be right without carefully evaluating whether they are in fact right? Is it part of group-think where people collectively take on a conviction of purpose based more on faith than fact and persist in a course of action which leaves any outside unbiased third party breathlessly slack-jawed by the sheer magnitude of their utter stupidity?

"I'd like a red line drawn with green ink." Yes, you laugh. How dumb. How absurd. You really do have to sit in a meeting and watch people do s**t like this. Are they on drugs? Is there something in the water? Humanity is doomed!

But how does this small humorous incident translate into real life, into something really, really big? In my blog posting "January 28, 1986, 11:38am: Oh, that's what an O-ring is for!" (Jan 28/2011), I discuss the Challenger space shuttle disaster. It seems that everybody at the engineering level knew the o-rings were faulty. But as you went up the hierarchy, less and less people were paying attention to this problem so when you arrived at the top, the people responsible for launching either did not know about the o-ring problem or they felt the risk of an o-ring failure was low. And what did they do? They thought you could draw a red line with green ink.


References

IMDb: Lauris Beinerts: Director, Writer, Producer
2014: The Expert (Short)
2012: Is the Tooth Fairy Real? (Short)
2011: Is This Free? (Short)

CNET - Mar 31/2014
This is how an engineer feels when he's surrounded by idiots by Chris Matyszczyk
My engineer friend George sometimes looks at me as if I'm a rancid chicken wing in a Michelin-starred restaurant. He doesn't understand why I don't think logically, rationally, understandably -- in short, why I don't think like him. It causes him to foam at the lips and emit high-pitched noises, not unlike those created by sheepdogs that have been run over by tractors. I never quite grasped what his problem was until I saw a YouTube video called "The Expert."

2014-04-09

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