Altitude Select

Q: Why have Altitude Select moved away from a standard recruitment model that has been on offer to businesses for so long.

A: Let me share an example... Did you know that the US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That is an odd number isn’t it?

So why?

Because that is the way we built them here in England, and our ex patriots built the US Railroads.

Why did we build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the tramways, and that was the same size.

So why did we build them that size?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in England.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman chariots formed the ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.

So when you see a standard recruitment model and ask what horse's ass came up with that, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story...When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters. They are made in Utah.

The engineers would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but they had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. They had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

Therefore, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse.

Now all the details of this story have not been entirely validated but it is presented here to make you realise why sometimes you need to move away from the norm to achieve more.

The moral here is that just because we have always done it that way, does not mean it’s the optimal way of doing something and that doing things without questioning them can have consequences elsewhere.