How to fix a leaking toilet with a handful of pennies and a tablespoon of sunflower oil: confessions of a tinkerer

Last year my landlord very nicely paid for my bathroom to be completely renovated while I was away on holiday. The plan was for me to come home to a bright new bathroom, but it took several weeks of plumbing visitations after my return for everything to work properly, more or less. One minor issue that was never quite resolved was the tendency for the toilet flush mechanism to get stuck open. It was one of those problems that didn't occur if you knew how to flush 'just right', but invariably appeared when uninitiated visitors flushed any-old-how. My guests should not require a special induction to flush the loo, but it was relatively simple for me to 'unstick' each time and didn't seem worth the effort to call a plumber. Plumbers can be as unreliable as modern flush mechanisms. Eventually even a 'just right' flush stuck open and the valve became more difficult to 'unstick'. By yesterday morning the toilet was leaking constantly. Something had to be done.

This is the point at which I should have called the plumber, but that would require looking up the phone number, rearranging my diary to work from home for a day, and a few more days of a leaking toilet. The toilet was right there in front of me, leaking, tempting me to tinker. Why spend five minutes making a phone call and booking a day at home when I had a whole bank holiday ahead of me to spend pulling my toilet apart?

The flushing mechanism is very modern. It consists of a cylinder with a valve on the bottom that is pulled up by a cable, similar to a brake cable on a bike, when the flush handle is pressed. It should be released when the flush handle returns to the normal position, but the valve was sticking in the up position. The flush mechanism consists of two 'black-boxes' - the cylinder with the sticking valve and the housing for the cable attached to the back of the flush handle. Normal people avoid opening their toilet cisterns. Smart people avoid opening 'black-box' mechanisms inside their toilets. Sensible people spend bank holidays sunning themselves in the park. 

The toilet was still leaking. I had removed the cylinder, I had a little 'black-box' in my wet hands. A voice inside my head said 'put the toilet back together, call the plumber', but my eye had spied the means to lifting the lid off the cylinder and my hand was reaching for the nail scissors and tweezers on the shelf above the sink. The voice inside was discussing options for plumbers, while my fingers discovered how the cable mechanism slotted into the valve mechanism. My fingers unslotted the mechanism, and then played with the molded bits of plastic, trying to figure out how it worked and why it wasn't. The voice inside let out a little squeak, but my fingers calmly reminded it that this was just another puzzle, like the wooden cubes or metal rings on the kitchen shelf at Grandma's house. Nothing had snapped or been lost, it would all come back together.         

If you are a parent, grandparent, teacher or otherwise concerned about the future of one or more children please make sure that they are never exposed to those darstedly little puzzles. They should come with a warning label 'keep out of reach of children, may cause brain damage'. They lead to irreversible neural re-structuring that causes vast overestimation of spatial and physical problem solving abilities. If one of those puzzles ever defeated me as a child there was always the option of putting the pieces in a plastic bag and waiting for Grandma to come over and show me how it was done. The stakes were somewhat higher with the tiny plastic pieces of my toilet. Grandma lives in Geraldton, my toilet is in London, and at 93 she is possibly past her puzzle-solving prime. 

I tinkered with the parts, and managed to put them back together, hoping that this reboot would be enough to solve the problem. The valve still stuck. The second black-box tempted me. My inner voice of reason was now whimpering with fear. Cable mechanisms have gone horribly wrong in my hands, leaving me stranded on the pavement with an upturned, brake-less bike halfway to work. My hands marched confidently on, now reaching into the cupboard for the spanners and screw drivers. If nothing broke and nothing was lost and if I moved slowly, everything would be OK. I opened the box, and the inner mechanism proved remarkably simple. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that lubricating the cable would probably help, but I didn't have any mineral oil or lubricating spray. The voice of reason could barely say 'walk down the street and buy a can of WD40', before my hands had reached for the sunflower oil from the kitchen. The cable was drizzled with edible oil and reinstated, and both black boxes returned to their rightful places in the cistern. The cable moved more freely, but the valve still stuck.

I picked up my purse and took out four pennies. I put the pennies on the top of the valve shaft to provide extra weight to help it drop down once the cable was released. The valve still stuck. I then found my jar of foreign coins and picked out the US pennies, Mexican pesos, Euro cents and Danish half-Kroner. I piled a few of them on top of the shaft, and placed some of them under the cylinder on top of the valve itself. 

It worked. 

I turned the water back on, filled the cistern and flushed, and flushed again, any-old-how. Every time the valve opened and closed on demand. There was a sunflower oil slick in the toilet and a rattle like a pocket full of change, but the cistern no longer leaked. I put the lid back on, packed the tools away and my sensible legs took me out jogging before my tinkering fingers could deny me any more sunshine.

Tinkering feels like a mental disorder. It is state of mental and physical obsession, a compulsion. Engineers are often characterised as tinkerers. The classic boy-geek engineer tinkers with TVs, cars or computers. I have never taken a TV apart nor deliberately looked inside a computer. I thought I was a different kind of engineer, interested more in the big picture than the nerdy mechanical detail. I thought I was special. I am not. It pains me deeply to come out as a tinkerer. Worse yet, I am a tinkerer of toilets.

Of course this is not the first time I have tinkered with a toilet. I have a secret history of opening cisterns and fiddling with valves. I usually take care not to tinker too long, lest people start to wonder what I am up to, but alone in the privacy of my bathroom my tinkering takes its own course. 

I know that tinkering is no longer something to be ashamed of. The 'maker' movement, including UCL's Institute of Making, positively celebrates this kind of behaviour, creating spaces for people to tinker together. Apparently there is honour in engaging directly and purposely with the material world around us. Matthew Crawford in his book 'Shop Class as Soulcraft' claims that working with our hands in this way is fundamental to our humanity. I should embrace my tinkering, be proud of it. 

So here I am. I am an engineer, and I tinker. I can no longer hide.      

Will the real imposter please stand up

Imposter Syndrome is the latest disorder of choice for those of us lucky enough not to have anything seriously wrong with us, but unlucky enough to be afflicted with a persistent sense of being out of our depth, standing on the outside looking in on all our competent and confident peers. It is a mild strain of inferiority complex. It is the feeling that we don't really deserve to be in the position we find ourselves, and one day those who know better will find us out and send us back to where we belong.

Everyone has Imposter Syndrome these days, particularly academics and particularly women. Sheryl Sandberg had a bout of it early in her career, Professor Stephen Curry recently outed himself as a sufferer on his blog, and Ruth Barcan wrote about it in the Times Higher Education magazine. The occasional speaker at our graduation ceremony last year called the women graduates out on it, saying they all looked more timid than the men crossing the stage (personally, I blame their shoes). Imposter Syndrome is a bit like thrush – it is an annoying discomfort that gets better or worse from time to time but never seems to properly go away, we all have it, we all know we all have it, but it still feels weird when an older woman stands up in academic dress and says it out loud.

The point of most of this sharing is to help us all to realise that even people who look successful and confident on the outside might be feeling just as uncertain as you are, particularly early in your career. If you have the same qualifications and experience as everyone else in the room, then you are no more faking it than they are. This problem can’t be necessarily be solved by more hard work, it just takes time and that magic ingredient ‘confidence’. As they say in AA, ‘fake it until you make it’.

Barcan’s THE article has a slightly different take. Her point is that that Imposter Syndrome is a more recent scourge of academia, brought on by unrealistic expectations from universities, students,  government and the public. We can’t all be ground breaking researchers, inspiring teachers, brilliant public speakers and social networkers, entrepreneurs, administrators and colleagues all of the time. But this is what the job demands, and so we pretend. We don’t have the time or energy to do anything as well as we would like to and we end up feeling like imposters. As Stephen Curry wrote in his blog, interdisciplinary research brings its own sense of inadequacy, always in between established points of knowledge, acutely aware of everything you don’t know. What this implies is that on some level, we actually are imposters. This is important in distinction from the version of the syndrome described by Sandberg and other boardroom feminists.

I have reached a point in my career where I am reasonably happy with my capabilities and I hope that I have a fairly balanced view of my limitations. I have been in academia long enough to know that I have as much right to be here as any of my colleagues. It was not always like this. For many years I was actually pretending. I was an imposter.

I am the first generation of my family to go to university and the only person in my extended family to have a PhD. My mother and grandmother had barely set foot on a university campus before they dropped me off for O-Week. At every stage of my career, from that very first day as a fresher right through my early years as an academic, I had to learn everything myself, from scratch. I am reasonably bright, and I learned quickly, but for much of that time I was one small step behind my colleagues from more academic families. When I was a kid hanging around listening to my Dad negotiate car deals, some of my colleagues were playing quietly down the back of the seminar room or doing their homework in proper, grownup libraries. I will bet my left foot that I could sell a car faster than most of them, but when it comes to knowing how to negotiate the nuances of academic life, they had a head start. They already knew a lot about how to be an academic, I was just pretending. But I learned. And so now, for the most part, I feel like I know what I am doing, and I have probably benefited from learning it all first hand.

There is a more dangerous strain of the syndrome that I now worry about. It is asymptomatic and often undiagnosed. This is the version of the illness that causes academics who are well recognised for their expertise in one specialist field start to pretend that they can speak or write knowledgably about others. I am highly susceptible to this. When my instinct says that I should decline an invitation to contribute to project or event on the basis of limited knowledge, it is tempting to tell myself that I am just suffering from Imposter Syndrome. Everyone is faking it, the devilish voice says, so I shouldn’t let my lack of confidence stop me from contributing and taking my 15 minutes at the podium. This is a very hard balance to strike, particularly when others seem willing to pretend to knowledge outside their narrow field. Interdisciplinary work means that, like Stephen Curry, I feel insecure in my own expertise most of the time, but this insecurity keeps researchers like us honest. It shows respect for colleagues in other fields of study and for the basic principles of academic work.

If you feel like an imposter, you probably are. If you are early in your career, keep working, keep growing older, and it should go away. If you are later in your career, stop, listen, and remember to show respect to your colleagues and the standards of knowledge we are paid to uphold. It is not necessarily a reason to hold back from contributing, but it can be a warning that you still have a lot to learn.

A democratic history of sewerage

Every culture has its mythologies and origin stories. These help us to frame our identities and provide a foundation from which to make sense of the uncertain world around us. Importantly, such stories usually tell us more about the present than the past. This is very different to the scholarly study of the past we call history, which requires painstaining research and detailed analysis*. The two are easily confused. What passes for 'engineering history' is more often 'engineering mythology'.

The story of Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the London sewers is one such touchstone, often deployed to support a particular view of the present, rather than to actually provide an explanation of the past. No better example can be found than this piece by John Kay in the FT. Kay's basic point is this - Balagette's far-sighted project to build London's sewer system would not have been possible today because of complicated project appraisal and planning procedures.

The project to build London's sewers was indeed a major engineering achievement, one of which my profession and city are rightly proud. This is one of the reasons why I teach the history of London's sewers to our second year students. However, the main learning outcome from this section of the course is that all major engineering projects happen in complex social, economic, ecological and political contexts. Taking a nineteenth century jewel of engineering and showing the messy details of political and technical negotiation runs precisely counter to the myths of engineering perpetuated in Kay's column.

The myth of London's sewers runs basically like this. There was a terrible environmental disaster. The politicians didn't know what to do. Our hero Sir Joseph Bazalgette stepped forward with the solution to the problem. The politicians gave him the money to implement his plans. The project succeeded, right up until the present day. The nineteenth century was the golden age of British engineering because politicians and activists did not stand in the way of progress. Engineers could solve all of today's problems if only the politicians, or more specifically the planning processes and environmental legislation, did not hold them up.

The history of London's sewers runs basically like this. London's population tripled in less than a century. The drainage and nightsoil systems that had been functioning reasonably effectively since the sixteenth century couldn't cope with the increased water and waste, leading to terrible environmental conditions with disastrous public health consequences. Until the 1840s the administration of sewers remained in the hands of decentralised vestries that had been formed hundreds of years earlier. Attempts to solve the sewer problem required institutional reform. Between 1848 and 1855 six separate 'Metropolitan Commissions of Sewers' were formed to try to come to an agreed solution. Engineers were involved in these commissions and presented an immense variety of solutions to the problem. There was much technical and political argument during this period, and the two often overlapped. In 1856 the Commissions were replaced with the Metropolitan Board of Works, a statutory body to solve the sewer problem. Joseph Bazalgette was appointed assistant surveyor to the Second Metropolitan Commission and worked his way up to being the inaugural Chief of the Metropolitan Board of Works. His original proposal as Chief Engineer drew on designs considered by the Commissions, and it was vetoed by Parliament on environmental and social grounds (discharge of sewage at Pimlico, concern about sewage flowing back into London on the incoming tide). Parliament was also concerned that Bazalgette had underestimated the cost of the project. The Great Stink and a change of government in 1858 led to reform of the bill governing the Metropolitan Board of Works, removing Parliamentary veto and providing Treasury guarantee of borrowing to finance the construction. Work started in 1859 on a modified proposal which did not discharge sewage into the Thames at Pimlico. The project was completed in 1888. During that time Bazalgette had to deal with a bricklayers strike, a sometimes hostile media, complex quality control systems and innovative contract management procedures.

If anything, the politics of sewers in London in the nineteenth century was more, not less, complicated than things are today (planning for the Thames Tideway 'supersewer' project has been remarkably smooth by comparison). Many of the consistent themes of British politics were present back then - centralised versus decentralised administration, expert led decisions versus democratic oversight and deliberation, managing the risks of government guarantee for major infrastructure investment in the capital, and the influence of strong personalities on debates and decisions.

The history of London's sewers shows us that democracy makes for better decisions about infrastructure. Bazalgette's sewers have served London well precisely because the options and plans were debated over many decades and because politicians and activists were present in the decision making, alongside the engineers. Let's all keep working together to make sure that democracy and good engineering are allowed to continue to deliver the infrastructure this city needs for centuries to come.
 
*I am not an historian. I have immense respect for those who are. For a full account of the history of the sewers and an insight into Bazalgette's life I recommend Stephen Halliday's book 'The Great Stink of London', published by Sutton Publishing in 1999.

Radical Drainage

What is the most radical movement in urban ecology? Transition Towns? Urban food growing? Passivhaus? Cycling? All these are significant in  changing behaviour, technology and cultures of how people who live in cities consume resources and relate to each other and their local environment. However, the movement I think is most significant in fundamentally altering the relationship between cities and the environment is to be found in the boring old world of drainage. In the UK the movement is known as Sustainable Drainage Systems (SUDS), in Australia it's called Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), and in the US it's Low Impact Development (LID). Recently the benefits of new approaches to drainage have been linked to biodiversity and the need to reduce urban heat island effects, coming together under the banner of Green Infrastructure (GI). Whatever the acronym, a quiet ecological revolution is under way in the drains and waterways of cities around the world.

For the last 150 years or more, the primary aim of an urban drainage system has been to move water away from streets and homes as quickly as possible so as to prevent flooding and stagnation of polluted water close to human settlement. This fits with a modernist separation of nature and culture. Cities are for culture, nature is 'out there', in 'the wild'. Cities are where nature is tamed, controlled, mastered for human benefit. There are some very good public health reasons for this. People drown in floods, and get sick and die of water related diseases such as malaria and cholera. 'Nature' uncontrolled can be dangerous.

The problem with moving water out of cities as quickly as possible is that it has to go somewhere. It disappears down a grate in the road during a rain storm, but then where does it go? One way or another the water ends up back in the local environment. This sudden rush of water can disrupt long established patterns of flow through rivers and wetlands, and the storm water is often contaminated. Furthermore, in the rush to build drainage systems many local waterways were culverted, concreted and covered over, converted from streams into drains to become the 'lost rivers' of our cities.

SUDS, WSUD and LID all started with concerns about the impact of the discharge of urban drainage systems on local aquatic environments. Moving up the pipe they proposed that instead of getting rid of water as quickly as possible, water should be given space in the urban environment. Cities and nature are perhaps inseparable. Techniques for holding water in the urban environment and letting it infiltrate or evaporate where it falls include ponds, rain gardens, permeable paving, swales, green roofs, rainwater harvesting, and the restoration of urban rivers and wetlands. Design techniques and technologies continue to develop, but what is most important is the fundamental shift in how water, as one of the most fundamental elements of nature, is conceived. Water is no longer a danger to be controlled, but an element to be celebrated and included in the city.

The move to more sustainable draingage systems and water sensitive cities has a long way to go and many hurdles to overcome (more on that in future posts). However, this fundamental shift in how engineers, planners and urban designers, and the communities they work with, approach water in cities is of momentous significance. If sewers are the conscience of the city, as Victor Hugo said, then SUDS may be a sign of our awakening to a more ethical relationship to the ecosystems that sustain us.  

Voice of exclusion

I have been studying, practicing, researching and teaching engineering for the best part of 20 years. I am a woman. This makes me unusual. Engineering is an uncommon choice of undergraduate course for women. Those who start, finish at a lower rate than their male counterparts, and are less likely to pursue engineering as a career. Like many women I abandoned engineering in my mid-twenties, leaving a fairly prestigious graduate post to pursue a social science PhD. It was a random coincidence of difficult personal circumstances and a unique recruitment opportunity at UCL that brought me back to engineering nearly 8 years ago.

Perhaps it's because I have left and come back, possibly because of my training in social science, or maybe because I was born feminist, but since I have returned to engineering I have become hyper-aware of the gender imbalance in my discipline and profession. This is very tiring. It is doubly arduous knowing the statistics and theories about gender and engineering, and at the same time dealing with my own little instances of exclusion. Being able to explain my experience as a member of the minority gender makes things harder, not easier. I wish I could erase the monitoring statistics and feminist theory from my mind, but I can't. I wish I did not have to brush off moments of ignorant discrimination, yet I must.

It is particularly disheartening for me when I come across bad theories about gender and engineering. I am frustrated by high feminist theory, that is barely accessible to me with my social science PhD and untranslatable to more conventional engineers. I get angry when I see sloppy analysis of data, particularly when it is used to support one of the most fashionable explanations for the persistent absence of women in all professional spheres, from the boardroom to the engineering lecture hall - the truism that women don't succeed because they lack confidence.

Engineers who are women are less confident in their professional abilities than engineers who are men. The question is why? And the answer more often than not turns out to be good old fashioned sexism, of the kind we like to pretend doesn't exist. Not big sexism, like women not being allowed to vote, but little, everyday sexism, the kind we brush off. Little sexism isn't something you can fight with a petition or a march on Parliament. It is not something you can argue in a tribunal, but it wears you down, it makes you feel unwelcome, it saps your confidence. On any given day, it can be outrageous or annoying, but over a career it all adds up to more than enough reasons to stop pushing yourself, stop testing your boundaries and striving for the top. It is certainly a reason to 'choose' to stay home with your babies, if you are lucky enough to have any.

Here are some of my own moments of little sexism. It is an indicative sample, not a comprehensive account. I am robust, and survived each encounter intact, but when I find myself thinking 'what are you doing here? you don't belong', moments like these might explain where those thoughts come from.

I am 17. I have just graduated from high school, dux of my class. My Mum and I are drinking tea in the church hall. An old lady is chatting to us and we tell her I am heading off to uni. She asks 'what will you study? Are you going to be a teacher like your Mum?'. 'No', I reply, 'I'm doing engineering'. The woman nearly chokes. 'Well that's unusual for a girl isn't it?'. We laugh it off, but a little voice starts whispering inaudibly in the back of my mind.

I have finished my first year and landed a job at our local mineral processing plant. In the induction I am told that this is an 'equal opportunity worksite'. I am assigned to a project that is monitoring a significant process change. I collect and analyse samples over the night shift. I share a 'lab' with two process operators and we get along, which is just as well since there isn't much space in the little hut. On my second shift I walk in to find 'Annie' posted on the wall. Annie isn't an operator or an engineer. Annie doesn't have any clothes on. I gather my kit and go out on site to collect my samples, and the boys do the same. I make it back to the lab before them and carefully take Annie off the wall. I am wondering what to do with her when I notice that my shaky hands have screwed her into a ball. I throw it in the bin. The boys come back, we go for smoko (Australian for tea break). Not a word is spoken, but that little voice is getting marginally louder. It whispers 'you don't belong here'.

I have graduated and am working at an aluminium smelter on the other side of the country. The company has an affirmative action policy. At least 20% of the operators are women, with higher representation amongst engineers and managers. Once more, I am working the night shift. The crew includes Shirley, who started at the smelter because she couldn't face nursing any more after the death of her father. She also likes the money and drives a red sports car. It is smoko and we are chatting about wives and girlfriends and work. Jason's girlfriend is out of work so I ask 'why doesn't she apply here?'. 'I wouldn't want that', he says. 'Why not?'. 'Well, I just wouldn't want my girlfriend doing this kind of work'. 'What about me? What about Shirley?'.'That's different. Shirl's one of the boys'. I ask Shirley if she thinks she is one of the boys, and she says no. I concur that I too have no desire to be a boy. We get back to work. The voice gets louder.

My career moves me back and forth across Australia a few more times until I overshoot and find myself in London. I am PI on a research project involving several departments at UCL. James is the programme manager. James and I are meeting for the first time with the head of one of the departments we hope to work with. He is an eminent professor. We shake hands and I introduce myself. 'Ha!', he laughs, 'you've got a funny accent! Like Crocodile Dundee'. Unfortunately I have left my machete at home, so we politely get on with the meeting. He speaks to James (the administrator) for the entire meeting, barely making eye contact with me (the PI). I conclude that despite, or maybe because of, his H-factor, this professor is a dick. He is also a big cheese and popular amongst other eminent professors in the faculty (even those with 'accents'). I get on with the programme, but the inner voice is now quite clear - 'you are not even worth talking to, you do not belong here'.

I am at a drinks reception with the Dean, a few other professors and a senior administrator. It is getting late and the crowd has thinned. The administrator turns to me and says 'what is a pretty young woman like you doing hanging around with a bunch of old men like us'. The Dean looks embarrassed. The inner voice is quiet. The voice of exclusion has spoken out loud.

I agree to join a committee looking at gender initiatives in science and engineering at UCL. We are presented with the statistics about the number of women professors and the rate of increase at UCL. The statistics are diabolical. I decide not to continue on the committee, not due to time pressure but because I am simply not robust enough to deal with such depressing numbers and the lack of serious action to change them. The voice is now screaming for me to get out, to find somewhere I belong, because all the evidence points to me having made a terrible mistake in laughing off that old lady after church that Sunday, all those years ago.

I am not leaving. I will stay, I will keep working, and I will keep talking back to that inner voice. But this is tiring. All the inner work to counter the outer moments of little sexism, year after year is draining. For now, I have decided to try my best to disengage from the wider project of understanding and counteracting sexism in engineering, both big and small. I just need to be an engineer.