I recently worked out that in any part of the world at any random hour there is always someone called Ahmed, Abdul or Alex at work; his job is to fix some kind of important telecoms, computer or networking equipment; and to haul away the defective kit and replace it with something that hopefully stays working for a bit longer.
He could be working in his country of birth, his ancestral country (any part of Asia from Bangladesh to Singapore) or some other random bit of the world – one common factor is the job is something no one else wants to do. It normally means working strange hours, being at height or in confined spaces, avoiding 230V / 400V strong voltage cables, asbest and spiders/snakes etc (at least those aren’t as bad in Blighty!). Everyone complains until the system is working once more; and an outside factor like the telephone company has screwed up some other part of it.
I use the screen name Alex The Engineer elsewhere as there are about 10 000 Chinamen called Alex who have ancestry from Malaysia/Singapore who do the same sort of work and share the same kind of hobbies such as photography and electronics – on “normal” social networks folk mix me up with them anyway no matter what other names I’d use (my real name is equally commonly duplicated online)…
