I was blinded by the brilliance

I have really never been too good at construction. My paper-mache never papered or mached, my birdhouses tended to look like pieces of wood with nails sticking out of it, and my doghouse...well, suffice it to say I never touched it during construction. The easiest way to know that was true is it actually looked like a doghouse!

I worked, of course, on numerous tree forts. The most successful one I ever built consisted of nailing a broken sheet of plywood between two tree trunks...on the ground. So I might not be the best one to talk to about construction techniqes.

For instance, I would never imitate the contractor who was building a bridge and decided to revise the blueprints. Not only did he revise the blueprints, he did it without checking with an engineer or, for that matter, drawing new blueprints. After all, he was only building a bridge. How important could that be?

Well, fairly important, apparently. His bridge collapsed. You would think the blame would fall on the contractor. And to some extent it did. But MORE blame was applied to the 2 government officials who hired him to build the bridge, allowed him to revise blueprints on his own, and somehow, some way let one little fact about this contractor who built the bridge which collapsed slip through the net; the contractor who redrew the plans by hand? He was blind!