Engineers rule

As we drive through one of the longest tunnels in the world - Arlberg in Austria - I marvel that I have 4 bars on my phone on the One (now Orange) network in the middle of the 9 mile tunnel.  I marvel that the GPS in the Hertz rental car which had greedily been sucking up signals from 7 satellites just before entering the tunnel was smart enough to know it would lose that signal for the length of the tunnel and as soon as we left the tunnel was ready to grab the signal in a matter of seconds. I marvel that my Nokia 500 also has a handy FM transmitter so I can beam my MP3  to an unused frequency on the car radio and there is no static in the middle of the tunnel. 

Of course, 2 days ago I was ready to throw the Nokia away. I downloaded European maps to the SD card before I left the US, and when I used its Navigation here it tells us where we are, but will not provide driving directions because of some licensing issues. There was no mention of that when I did the download. Fat good it does us to find that out after we land here. We had to upgrade cars to get the GPS from Hertz. And it occurred to me some bureaucrat at Nokia ruined the experience of what his engineers had put together. Bureaucrats at Orange and AT&T ruin the engineering feat of a clear subterranean signal by charging ridiculous roaming rates for that obscure location as any in a well-connected European city.

And I cannot begin to imagine how many bureaucrats tried to screw up the engineering feat that is the Arlberg Tunnel.

Let engineers, broadly defined as product creators and problem solvers, run the world. They could not do any worse than what we have today.  

Comments

[Anil Kurnool]

Thanks for those encouraging word for the poor engineers...