i-Umarell
I'm a member of a strange Italian sub sect
Regular readers of this substack will probably be aware of my age. (69 and a half)
People I walk by in the street might be able to guess my age within a couple of years, young people I pass on the street don’t notice me at all. That’s fine, when I was their age I don’t ever remember seeing any old people.
No question, I’m in the retirement age bracket even though I’m still working full time. And I’m a man. And I have had a lifelong fascination with engineering, be it automotive, trains, ships, aircraft, or large scale civil engineering.
I find it hard to walk past some novel looking machine that’s making a noise and digging, pumping, grinding, lifting or pounding something to create a different environment.
Below is a picture my wife took when we were briefly visiting Geneva in Switzerland. We were walking along the river where crystal clear water flows out of the enormous and pristine Lake Geneva. The cleanest river water I have ever seen, hats off Swiss authorities for managing to maintain that kind of river in an urban environment.
The picture shows a large crane that had been vibrating long steel piles into the riverbed. I was fascinated by the vibrating machine attached to the end of the crane, the noise this thing produced made your teeth rattle.
Instead of hammering the steel piling, it literally shakes it into the ground. I was amazed that this system works, it doesn’t make sense if you don’t understand physics and geology. I assume the riverbed in Geneva is mainly mud or clay, not solid rock, but maybe this noisy machine can sink a pile into any material.
These are the sort of thoughts going through my head as I watched the construction team at work.
So while she waits patiently for her daft old husband to get bored of watching a crane at work, she eventually took this picture. Apparently I stood there for quite a long time, well, they were prepping to lift another enormous steel girder into position. I was trying to work out what they were doing. Perfectly respectable occupation.
The Mrs didn’t show me the picture until a few days later.
However, a few moments after this was taken I learned from a sign attached to the security fence that this was a Geneva City authority project to install a new industrial scale heat pump which will extract heat from the river that passes under the buildings you see in the background. The resulting hot water will be sent through underground pipes to district heating systems in the surrounding neighbourhoods.
It will heat tens of thousands of homes. That’s my kind of civil engineering.
All very interesting, so anyway, the following weekend back in the UK, we are visited by my daughter and her boyfriend who is an actual, functioning, well educated, bona-fide engineer.
My wife showed my daughter the picture, then when I begged to see what they were laughing about she eventually showed it to me. They both said it was absolutely typical of me. This was the actual quote from my daughter; ‘A sad old man looking at a crane, that is soooo cute!’
Her boyfriend then informed me that there is an Italian word that describes precisely what I was doing. I was being an Umarell. He had heard it mentioned at various large scale construction projects he’s worked on around the country. An old man stops outside the safety fence, his hands clasped behind his back, watching quietly as the work progresses.
The term was coined by a writer called Danilo Masotti in 2005 in Italy, this is his description: ‘An umarell refers to an older man who spends his days inspecting the work in progress at construction sites.’
If you check Wikipedia you get the following: ‘“Umarell. Men of retirement age who spend their time watching construction sites, especially roadworks, stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice to the workers.”
There’s no getting around it, that’s me that is, I am a part time Umarell. I’m maybe a little ashamed, unlike the experienced and highly skilled retired engineers for whom this term was coined, I am a mere amatuer.
I have spent years of my life watching engineers at work. It was my job for a decade so I’ve had a lot of practice. But this is why I’m not a genuine Umarell, the term specifically refers to people of a certain age who have had a lifetime career as engineers, and they have found a new role in Italy.
Umarell’s are now casually employed to not only watch a construction site, maybe even give advice to the people working on the site, but also as security, watching out for any scallywagging.
This strikes me as a very good idea, something which might be introduced in other countries.
Whatever, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this very informal and in some ways private activity has a term to describe it in such detail. I’m not sure I see other old chaps doing this in the UK, maybe it is a specifically Italian thing. Often nowadays a construction site is screened off to the general public and you can’t see anything, which is a crying shame for sad old men who love to see what’s going on.
So yes, I was a bit embarrassed that my wife took the picture, I am turning into a sad old man who has time to stand and watch a crane operator move big lumps of steel, but the world is fascinating, I always learn something when I see big machinery doing something, so I’m not going to stop.
I feel seen...
Lovely legs Robert. You’re far from alone and you do yourself a disservice saying you’re not an engineer. You could probably teach all of us a few things. In fact, you regularly do!