This weekend I’ve decided to finally get down to completely my chartership forms. For those in the dark, part of a professional engineer’s life (and I’m not talking about your electrician or telephone repair man, who while both are great fields, they are definitely not engineers) is to try and achieve his chartership status. The status means a lot of things for different people and once you’re in the group you are really part of a group of people that have fulfilled specific criteria (ranging from their technical knowledge to their project management skills to their people skills and so on) and therefore you look at them in a completely and different manner.

I felt it most recently when I was sitting in a meeting this week with another consultant from another company and his business card had the letters CENG. That was in many respect enough for me to understand that the guy in front of me wasn’t pretending, he was the real deal and therefore I could discuss things with him on a specific level. Obviously he couldn’t really look at me with the same light as I’m missing those 4 little initials after my name. The thing is that after 6 years of work experience in the construction and building services industry, I’m no longer pretending either. I’m doing these things that are required of you as a Chartered Engineer. The only thing that is stopping from going forward is myself. So this weekend in the History of Khaled, I will be spending nearly EVERY waking hour to dealing with these forms once and for all. All that vigor that I put into my art, into my work on a regular basis, into my online contributions will now be put into my Chartership status. I will not go into work on Monday without that form completed as a draft and ready to go to my mentor as a first stab for him to pass comments.

However in order to do this, I’m probably going to need to sort out my supplies early in the morning for the weekend, and I’m going to have to turn off the internet. I’m only allowed specific toilet and food breaks. I’ve got the evening off, however the entire weekend is dedicated to this goal, fully and totally. Lets see if I actually get things done.