12th March 2012, 02:08 PM
Marcus Brody Wrote:Something that's puzzled me for several years is the large number of non-driving archaeologists, which seems to me to represent a higher proportion than you'd find in the general population. I know learning to drive is expensive, and short-term contracts and working away may mean that you're not in any given area long enough to complete a course of lessons and sit a test, but it can potentially make the difference in deciding who gets kept on at the end of a contract - if you've got two people of roughly equal ability, you'll probably hold onto the one who can get him- or herself out to the small-scale one person watching brief, rather than the one who'd need to be driven out there by someone else.
Have had a good rant on here before about this, it's been noticeable and much discussed for years that a ridiculously small percentage of diggers seem to have learnt to drive - it regularly results in significant operational difficulties around here if there are a lot of small jobs on, and means that often we've had to give work to people purely because they could drive rather than that they were the best people for the job. On the 'taxi-driver' front, these days I generally just don't offer people lifts if I can avoid it, after a quarter century + of taxiing, I'd have thought occasional bursts of gratitude (or possibly the odd tenner towards the petrol) would be in order, an awful lot of people seem to think they have a god-given right to transportation by those who've actually bothered to get off their a**es, save up and pass a test. And, errr, in this day and age isn't passing your test just part of growing up?