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This is, basically, a Dad story. With bonus wee!highly.
Shortly after I was born, my father (in his late twenties) retrained as an aircraft technician, by dint of joining the Air Force. This meant he was at LEAST five years older than everyone in his cohort, and potentially up to ten. He was also very, very smart - intellectually he absolutely had (has) the capacity to handle university level math and engineering, but due to Reasons he never finished high school and to this day persists in thinking he's not that smart.
Anyway. After finishing initial training, he was posted off to what's basically a two-year internship or traineeship type thing. Surrounded by other newly qualified frame mechanics, spending two years specialising in their particular subset of aircraft. By and large, your average frame mechanic is not a highly... verbal kind of person. Good with his hands, good with doing what he's told, maybe a bit of a nerd about planes, but not necessarily king of the spelling and/or saying bee.
Aircraft windshields, as it happens, are made of a substance called methyl methacrylate. In its commercial form, this stuff is 'perspex' or 'plexiglass'. For whatever reason (i think the particular methyl methacrylate used for planes isn't from the same company as the perspex you can buy in an Aussie hardware, the RAAF always call it methyl methacrylate, at least on paper.
My father's colleagues, I am told, did not take easily to this word. They disliked it, could not be taught to pronounce it, and generally objected to it.
Dad must have complained about this at home, and somehow got me involved (age approximately the age I was in this bucket photo in my icon).
Dad: Highly, can you say methyl methacrylate?
Me: no
Dad, cunningly: what can't you say?
Me, with infinite tiny patience: meth-yl-meth-acryl-ate.
I'm told he took me to work and repeated this procedure in front of his colleagues.
Unsurprisingly, Dad's colleagues tended to either love him or find him infuriating.
This has been your not-quite-regular post of Amusing Family Anecdotes.
Shortly after I was born, my father (in his late twenties) retrained as an aircraft technician, by dint of joining the Air Force. This meant he was at LEAST five years older than everyone in his cohort, and potentially up to ten. He was also very, very smart - intellectually he absolutely had (has) the capacity to handle university level math and engineering, but due to Reasons he never finished high school and to this day persists in thinking he's not that smart.
Anyway. After finishing initial training, he was posted off to what's basically a two-year internship or traineeship type thing. Surrounded by other newly qualified frame mechanics, spending two years specialising in their particular subset of aircraft. By and large, your average frame mechanic is not a highly... verbal kind of person. Good with his hands, good with doing what he's told, maybe a bit of a nerd about planes, but not necessarily king of the spelling and/or saying bee.
Aircraft windshields, as it happens, are made of a substance called methyl methacrylate. In its commercial form, this stuff is 'perspex' or 'plexiglass'. For whatever reason (i think the particular methyl methacrylate used for planes isn't from the same company as the perspex you can buy in an Aussie hardware, the RAAF always call it methyl methacrylate, at least on paper.
My father's colleagues, I am told, did not take easily to this word. They disliked it, could not be taught to pronounce it, and generally objected to it.
Dad must have complained about this at home, and somehow got me involved (age approximately the age I was in this bucket photo in my icon).
Dad: Highly, can you say methyl methacrylate?
Me: no
Dad, cunningly: what can't you say?
Me, with infinite tiny patience: meth-yl-meth-acryl-ate.
I'm told he took me to work and repeated this procedure in front of his colleagues.
Unsurprisingly, Dad's colleagues tended to either love him or find him infuriating.
This has been your not-quite-regular post of Amusing Family Anecdotes.