I think the best way to share the joy of reading this article is to share the article itself!)

Read on!!!

By Janet Wright

"First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, bacon, processed meat and tuna from a can, and didn’t worry about getting diabetes or cancer. Then after that trauma, we cut our teeth on baby cots covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

We had no childproof locks on cupboards or draws or safety covers on 13amp sockets to quell our engineering curiosity. Then we rode our bikes successfully without helmets or protective padding. We rode in cars that had no seat belts or air bags. Our fathers could actually recognise what was under the bonnet and encouraged us to make our own mistakes interpreting poorly translated foreign manuals.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Takeaway food was limited to fish and chips wrapped in newspaper – no pizza shops, McDonalds, KFC, Subway or Nandos. Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn’t open at weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this. Then we could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner shop and buy toffees, gobstoppers, bubble gum and some bangers to blow up frogs. We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter, drank soft drinks with sugar in them, but we weren't overweight because we were always playing outside.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back for tea. No one was able to phone us all day and we still were OK. We would spend hours building go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.

We were more interested in what was inside radios and TVs than what was broadcast on them. We got shocks off various other electrical appliances, blew fuses but without any long lasting effects. We managed to pass maths exams without calculators and handle Bunsen burners without being psychologically scarred. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii, X-boxes, no video games at all, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no Lawsuits resulting from these accidents. We made mud pies and ate worms, and the worms did not live in us forever. We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays. We rode our bikes or walked to a friend’s house. Career advice was still useless, but we knew we were going to be engineers so it didn’t matter.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with other engineering colleagues who had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. If you were born after 1975 then it may be humbling to know how brave all those boring old farts you work with really were."