Last week I had an appointment with Professore Giorgio Croci of La Sapienza University, the founder of ISCARSAH and a big name in my field. I walked to his office after work. Small talk was in Italian, which was fine, and just as we began to actually talk about the course, Croci said something in Italian that I didn't catch, so I apologized and said my Italian wasn't too good, so he switched over English. Well, it turned out that the reason I didn't understand him was because he was using a proper name of one of his African colleagues.
I realized very soon that my Italian comprehension was far better than his English comprehension, so we swapped back over to Italian. It was really exhilarating to talk about my profession with one of the world's experts, and I was able to communicate just fine, inspite of numerous grammatical and pronunciation errors. It was a true linguistic victory.
Croci compared working with problematic old buildings to a doctor working with an elderly patient. You try to assess the symptoms as best as you can, take samples when appropriate, come up with a diagnosis, and act in an appropriate manner to neutralize threats to the building's health. I found it a really interesting analogy and has given me a new perspective on my work. People expect their structural engineers to be infallible - "is it safe or not"? Welllll, to be honest, there's uncertainty and probability in everything we do. Sadly, many structural engineers do believe that they are infallible.
Croci also recommended liberating oneself from the calculations - which are a structural engineer's bread and butter. But being able to carefully assess the condition and look for signs of distress are just as important as calculations - those uncertainties and probabilities can completely distort the mathematical results.
