One of my favourite quotes from the author Nevil Shute is, "It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound".

(It was in one of my all-time fave non-fiction books called Slide Rule: the Autobiography of an Engineer about a rivalry between government bureaucrats and an engineering group to develop two airship designs.)

The quote reminds me of a time when Hubby and I were in the hardware store and he had some sort of plan to set up a pipe from a water tank to the garden, or something and was telling me what to look for in the plumbing section and another man started having a bit of a chat about it. I suspect he was a plumber because he had a wry grin on his face but was too polite to say what he really thought. I should have asked him for his business card.