Right, someone asked me about that whole “rubber dancing engineer timber” thing the other day. Man, that takes me back. It wasn’t even a proper project name, you know? Just what we ended up calling it because the whole situation was… well, like that.

Getting Started, Sort Of

It landed on my desk after the higher-ups had one of their ‘blue sky thinking’ sessions. No real brief, just a vague idea about combining flexibility – that was the ‘rubber’ part, I guess – with solid structure, the ‘timber’. And the ‘dancing’? That was probably how they saw the market, always moving, unpredictable. And I was the poor ‘engineer’ supposed to make sense of it.

So, first thing I did was try to pin down what they actually wanted. Spent a week just talking to people. Marketing had one idea, sales another, tech leads just shrugged. It was like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Total mess.

The Messy Middle

I decided, okay, forget the talk, let’s just build something. Anything. I grabbed some scrap wood – literal timber – from the workshop downstairs. Found some old bungee cords and elastic bands for the ‘rubber’ element. My plan was just to make a physical model, something, anything, to show them how bonkers the concept was when you tried to make it real.

I started putting it together in my little corner. Cut the wood, drilled some holes, stretched the rubber bands across. It looked ridiculous. A shaky wooden frame that wobbled if you breathed on it – the ‘dancing’ part, achieved perfectly by accident. My boss walked past, saw it, and said, “Excellent! Exactly the dynamic synergy we envisioned.” I nearly choked.

So, phase two began. Trying to make this wobbly mess… do something useful? We were supposed to turn this ‘concept’ into some kind of adaptable display stand, I think. Don’t ask. I spent weeks tweaking it. Tried different types of wood, stronger rubber, weights, counterweights. Every change I made just shifted the wobble somewhere else. It never felt stable, never felt right. It danced, alright, but usually right off the table.

• Fought with the design software because it had no setting for ‘random wobble’.
• Argued (politely, mostly) in meetings that the core idea was flawed.
• Scavenged for better materials because the budget was basically zero.
• Documented everything, mostly to cover my own back.

The End Result… Or Lack Thereof

Eventually, after months of this nonsense, there was another management reshuffle. New boss came in, took one look at my latest ‘dancing timber’ prototype, asked what it was for, and couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone who’d originally commissioned it.

Turns out, the original ‘blue sky thinkers’ had moved on or forgotten about it. The whole thing just got quietly shelved. No big finale, no product launch, nothing. All that time, all that messing around with wood and rubber bands… poof. Gone.

Looking back, “rubber dancing engineer timber” was the perfect name. It summed up the whole experience: flexible requirements stretching a rigid structure managed by a stressed-out engineer, all leading to a chaotic dance that ultimately went nowhere. Sometimes, you just gotta laugh, right? Anyway, that was my little adventure into corporate absurdity. Moved on to less wobbly things after that, thankfully.