International Comradeship

I have worked across the five boroughs of New York City as well as Ireland and the United Kingdom
and more recently in the Middle East.
One of the things I enjoy most about my job is coming across different characters on the
 construction site. I remember in the summer of 1997, fresh after graduation working on the
construction of the new Sainsbury's supermarket, Finchley Road, London. One of the
 foremen who was in charge of the site excavation and the loading of trucks, was called
'Topsoil Tom'. Nobody knew what his real name was and this is what everyone on the site
referred to him as.

When I was living in the United States, one of the first projects I got involved with was
the construction of a new shopping mall in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Towards the end of the
project when the contractor was preparing the subsoil for the laying of asphalt for the
customer car parks, one of the operators who was operating the grader was known by his
workmates as 'Oklahoma Joe'. When I questioned him afterwards and asked where he was from
in the state of Oklahoma, he told me that he was from Pennsylvania and not Oklahoma.
I then asked him why he was known as 'Oklahoma Joe'. He then told me that he drove through
 Oklahoma on a bus once.

The things I enjoy most about the civil engineering profession is the time I have
spent in different countries, sampling the local cultures on different construction sites.
The comradeship between the workmen and of course gaining knowledge from fellow Civil
Engineering colleagues on a Global capacity.