Anecdotes

I learned when I was a boy that rational analysis is superior to common sense thanks to my mother's hats. In those days, that is in the 1940s, ladies had their hats custom made by ladies specialists in making hats. One day, my mother complained that her hats where too large even though she had given the exact dimension of her head to the hat maker. It was during World War II and certain things were not available. Like all persons involved in making clothes, my mother was using a measuring tape but the tape was worn out and new tapes were not available. The first 2cm were missing, therefore my mother after measuring her head added 2cm to the measurement she had made. My father told her that because the first 2cm of the tape were missing she should not have added 2cm to the measured size of her head but, on the contrary, she should have subtracted 2cm from the measurement. I witnessed a discussion between my mother invoking common sense and my father replying “Sorry, it is mathematical and this is why your hats are four centimeters too large”. This was the first time I understood the bad consequences of using common sense.

Early in my career, in the mid 1960s, I learned how important it is to go to the field thanks to the sense of humor of a seasoned consulting engineer for whom I was doing some design work. The seasoned consulting engineer told me one day: “You seem to like what you do and you probably want to make a career in geotechnical engineering. If this is the case, believe me, never, ever go to the field!” As a young engineer, I was surprised, to say the least, having learned that geotechnical engineering is an “outdoor sport” and having already been in the field a number of times. Then, the seasoned consulting engineer added “Yes, never go to the field if you want to stay in this profession, because you will be disgusted when you see what ‘they’ do with your neat designs”. Naturally, I did not follow his advice and I spent a large part of my career on site. From spending time on site I understood the necessity of doing designs that can really be constructed. I also learned that mistakes can be made in the field, sometimes big mistakes. As a result, I learned that as a good designer you should not only do a design that can be constructed, but you should also provide what I sometimes call negative information, I mean you should also tell what not to do. In other words, a good designer should foresee potential construction mistakes. Some of these warnings against potential construction mistakes include, for example: do not place a geosynthetic on top of a geosynthetic unless this is specified in the design. Indeed, I have seen cases where there was some extra geotextile or geomembrane available in the field and overzealous installers or contractors thought it was a good idea to use the extra geosynthetic by placing it on top of an already placed geosynthetic as dictated by common sense that two is better than one. Another example of a design that was improved, so to speak, by a contractor is the wrapping of a perforated drainage pipe with a geotextile. In most cases, as I have indicated in papers, this is a recipe for guaranteed clogging.

In the late 1960s, in France, Louis Ménard developed the use of dynamic compaction of soils. The problem was to get this new technique approved by construction safety organizations that are very powerful in France because of their key role for insurance companies. Indeed, a building cannot, or is unlikely to, be insured if its design is not approved by a construction safety organization. When Louis Ménard wanted to use this technique as a way to improve the foundation soil for a new building to be constructed on that soil, the very conservative safety organization involved in this project was reluctant to give its approval because of lack of experience with this new soil improvement technique. I was asked to participate in a meeting between Louis Ménard, the construction safety organization, the owner of the project, and the general contractor. There was an endless discussion on what kind of rationale could be used to justify the use of dynamic compaction and to ensure that the construction safety organization would approve it. As the discussion was leading nowhere, I finally proposed a solution. The solution I proposed was to forget this meeting. Louis Ménard would improve the foundation soil using dynamic compaction. Then, an independent soil investigation company would be asked to perform a classical soil investigation as if the soil had not been improved by dynamic compaction but was natural soil. I said that only after we have good results, hopefully, from the soil investigation, we would ask the construction safety organization to start its mission, as if it was a natural soil. I concluded my proposal by saying “we will operate as if the soil had been made by God and not by Louis Ménard”. The representative of the construction safety company was extremely happy with that solution. They did not have to approve the use of dynamic compaction, they only had to approve the soil as a sound foundation soil based on a classical soil investigation. Louis Ménard was extremely happy and very grateful to me. His gratitude materialized by more projects with the Ménard organization and a couple of good lunches with Louis Ménard who was a very pleasant and civilized person. However, Louis Ménard had a certain ego. He was very proud of his achievements and very pleased to explain that his inventions were excellent. A participant at the meeting told me that the most important thing I had done at this meeting was not to find a solution but to put Louis Ménard and God on the same level.

Action supported by a rational analysis should be undertaken even if it is unconventional. In the 1970s, when I was at the university of Grenoble, I had a very small and inexpensive convertible car. One Sunday, I was working alone in the soil mechanics building. It was a sunny summer day and I had left my car in the parking lot with the rooftop open. As it happens sometimes in a mountain environment, there was a sudden hail storm. I had to close the car rooftop. I was afraid of being completely drenched so I decided to completely undress myself. There was nobody obviously in the streets of the campus, and there was nobody in the building since there was no other car on the parking lot. I had to protect my head from the hail. I took the lid of a trash can I found in a closet. Then, I laughed because the scene was extraordinary: a man entirely naked with a trash car lid on his head walking in a university campus. I rushed to my car to close the rooftop. The inside of the car was quite wet but it could have been worse if my car had been a fancy sport car with bucket seats.

In 1975 I presented my first lecture in English. I had been invited to present a lecture on geotextiles in Tehran, Iran. I was told “you can give this lecture in French or in English: senior engineers speak French in Iran, because many of them were educated in France, but young engineers are fluent in English not in French”. I accepted the challenge of giving the lecture in English, which at that time was difficult for me because my English was not that good. So I had to do special training in France before the trip to Iran. I hired an English teacher to help me prepare and rehearse the lecture. In the airplane going from Paris to Tehran I kept repeating the lecture which I knew from the top of my head. So I was well prepared to deliver the lecture in English, but I worried a lot about questions at the end. When I finished the lecture, I was exhausted but happy because I had made it. The moderator of the session said “we still have exactly 11 minutes for questions and answers but no more than 11 minutes because we must attend a reception with some high-ranking people who do not attend the lecture but will be at the reception — so please, who wants to ask a question?”. At this point my heart was beating because I worried about my ability to answer questions in English, even my ability to understand the questions. A senior attendee stood up and, by some miracle, asked a question in French. It was a very simple question on benefits of a geotextile in a road. I could have answered this question very easily and briefly, however I elected to give an 11-minute long answer in French and at some point I was interrupted by the moderator saying “well thank you for this very informative reply, but we have to go, we have to close the session to attend the reception”.

Shortly after the lecture in Tehran in 1975, I decided to spend a month in Oxford to improve my English. At the University of Oxford there was an English course in the summer that attracted students and others from all over Europe. The first day we were all, perhaps 500 or 1,000, in a large room with small tables and we were asked to work on a test for a couple of hours. The test consisted of many questions with multiple choice like ABCD over 12 pages or more, I don't remember. I realized that 12 pages with perhaps 10 multiple choice questions per page multiplied by 1,000 candidates was a huge number.  The questions were mostly about English vocabulary. And all of that had to be marked up by the next day. So I thought that an army of correctors was needed, which was impossible. Therefore, it was clear that there was a system. I decided to first skip the questions I could not answer and I answered the questions I could answer as quickly as possible. The questions I could answer were scattered over the 12 pages and I noticed that the good answers (assuming that my answers were good) where always at the same location in the page. Clearly the correctors were using a template to evaluate the test. So, using the location of the good answers on a certain page, I went to all of the pages and I checked what should be the good answer at the same location. By using this strategy, I could answer most questions or perhaps all the questions. The next day, the results of the test were available in the morning and it turned out that I was selected to be in the top class. In this class we were about 20. There were some good students and also, as I realized later, some young English teachers in their own country, I mean natives of Sweden, Germany, Spain and France who were teaching English in their own country. So the group was excellent, and I was the bad one. A few days later, the professor explained to us that we were attending an intensive course because we were the best etc., and he asked us to write something in 5 minutes on the meaning of intensive courses. Ohlala! For me it was the beginning of a challenge: how could I survive one month in a group where everybody was so much better than me, the professor would certainly notice. Fortunately, I was helped by the fact that many English words have a French origin, so I could understand ‘intensive’. I did not want to write a long sentence because I would make many mistakes and I did not want to show that I did not deserve to be in the top class. So I simply wrote: “In intensive there is the intention to be intense”. These nine words saved me. The professor liked it so much that he read it to the class and he said “this man put it in a nutshell”. From that point on, I was accepted in the course and treated as a normal student and not as an intruder, as I was afraid it could be. Since I was the older member of the group, and since for me it was some sort of a sacrifice to spend one month in a course, whereas for the younger students it was some sort of vacation, I imposed to the French (who were the majority of the group) to speak only in English when we had a coffee break or when we went for lunch together. This worked. They all followed my rule, we spoke only English, and I learned from them. Then a funny thing happened the last day of the course. I realized that one of the French, an English teacher, had a strong southern accent when speaking French! This was so unexpected because she spoke English with such a good British accent, since she was a teacher.

In Oxford, instead of staying in the university, I elected to stay with a family. I have no idea how they remember me, but I realize I was a pain in the neck because I was asking questions all the time on various subjects, but when I knew many words in that subject, I was no longer interested in the subject even if the hosts were. For example, I declared that I loved to work in the kitchen and in particular to wash dishes or do all the work that nobody likes to do. So the lady was extremely happy that I wanted to help her in the kitchen but after three sessions I knew how to name everything I could see in the kitchen, and to name every activity I was involved in while in the kitchen, I declared I was no longer interested in the kitchen. Then I declared a sudden interest for the car in the garage etc. One day the parents asked me “could you stay at home one afternoon with the boy, it would be good because we could go somewhere”. So one day I had no course at the university, I stayed home with the boy and I declared I was very interested in cricket, so we played cricket. This obviously was the first time in my life, and also the last one, I played cricket. I asked the boy to explain everything about cricket, which he did, and we started playing.  Since I had been playing tennis all my life I could catch the cricket ball with the bat and send the ball very far to the point the boy was impressed. But my goal was not to be a good cricket player, my goal was to talk with the boy so I asked him to explain the rules several times and every time I pretended that I did not understand some detail of the rules, so the boy had to repeat and I repeated, etc., etc. Later in the afternoon, when the parents came back, they asked if everything went well and I said “well, you should ask the boy”. The boy said “I played cricket all afternoon with the Frenchman. He impressed me because he's very strong, he hits the ball and the ball goes very far”. So the father said “really a Frenchman can play cricket?”. And the boy replied “yes, he is very strong but he is not intelligent at all: I had to explain the rules so many times and he could not understand them. Really this Frenchman is strong but not intelligent.”

Between 1976 and 1978, while at the University of Grenoble, I presented a series of lectures on geotextiles in the United States, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, as well as in European countries. As a result, I realized that this international activity was not compatible with teaching in a French university. Also I wanted to do more consulting and I wanted to do it in English to support my international activities. So I decided to move to the United States. Pierre Londe was president of the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) and I had worked on projects with him, in particular Valcros Dam where he reviewed my design. Pierre Londe put me in contact with Yves Lacroix, a French engineer who had worked with Karl Terzaghi and was executive vice president of Woodward Clyde Consultants. Yves Lacroix indicated that he was coming to Paris and agreed to interview me. Fortunately, the time schedule was complicated (which I learned had pleased Yves Lacroix). Indeed, I told him that I could be in Paris for only a few hours in the evening, because I was busy in the University of Grenoble in the afternoon and I had to teach a course in the University of Grenoble the next day in the morning. So I had to fly from Grenoble to Paris to meet with Yves Lacroix at the famous Train Bleu restaurant (in the Paris railway station) for dinner at 19:00. I would then have to catch a train at almost midnight to be in Grenoble at 7:00, just in time to drive to the university to get ready to teach the course. When we sat down at our table in the Train Bleu restaurant, I wrote on a piece of paper 1978.04.17.19:00. Yves Lacroix was intrigued and asked me “why did you write those numbers on top of your piece of paper?”. I replied “because it is the date of our meeting”. And he said “but those numbers are bizarre”. I said “no, I put the year first and then the month, then the day, then the hour, then the minutes, because this is the only logical order since we write from left to right, and my brain cannot understand dates that are written in any other order”. After a few seconds Yves Lacroix said “you are hired by Woodward Clyde Consultants, we need ultra logical brains like yours, and now let's talk about the food and the wine”. On these subjects, Yves Lacroix impressed me! Obviously, I did not realize in the 1970s that the date system I then used spontaneously would be adopted in the 21^st century under the influence of the rationality imposed by computers.

In 1978 I moved from France to the United States to work for Woodward Clyde Consultants in the Chicago office. The goal was for me to start and develop a team of engineers called the Geotextiles and Geomembranes Group. A succession of young engineers worked in this group with me, but I realized at some point that I needed an engineer with a high caliber. I asked Yves Lacroix, who was my boss in this Chicago office, to find such a high-caliber engineer. On several occasions Yves Lacroix came to my office with the curriculum vitae of a good engineer, generally with a PhD. I read the curriculum vitae and every time I told Yves Lacroix: “this engineer doesn't seem to be good enough to work with me”. As a result, Yves Lacroix became impatient. But one day finally he came to my office with a big smile and he said “I have the perfect candidate, a Berkeley PhD”. I read the curriculum vitae and I said “it is not bad, indeed you are on the right track, and I think that the next one could be the good one”. Then Yves Lacroix strongly disagreed and told me “you are impossible, you are never satisfied, I can tell you that this is an excellent candidate and you should hire him”. As we pursued the discussion on the curriculum vitae, Yves Lacroix became really upset and said “you must hire this candidate and I will give you a good reason you must hire him: because he is better than you”. After hearing those strong words, I remained silent for 10 or 20 seconds as I did not know what to say but eventually I told Yves Lacroix: “finally I understand why you hired me”. Obviously this was the end of the discussion. We hired the Berkeley PhD. This was Rudy Bonaparte.

The organization of the second international conference on geotextiles, held in 1982, prompted discussions on the formation of an international society. On 23 June 1980, in Chicago, I was chairing a meeting of the organizing committee appointed a few weeks before at a meeting of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) to organize “an” international conference on geotextiles. An important item on the agenda was the selection of the name of the conference. We considered the name “Second International Conference on Geotextiles”, thereby recognizing the precedent set by the International Conference on the Use of Fabrics in Geotechnics held in Paris in 1977 and setting a trend for future conferences. However, one member of the committee objected that, since the conference held in Paris was not called the “first” conference, it was not appropriate to call our conference the “second”. To which I replied that a good husband would not call his wife “my first wife” while he is married to her. The name of the conference was adopted and the minutes of the meeting read: “The official name will be Second International Conference on Geotextiles. This name implies that the conference held in Paris in 1977 is recognized as the first one and that a third conference could be organized in 1986 or 1987. Also implied is that an International Society on Geotextiles should be created.”

Excerpt from: Giroud, J.P., 2006, “A short history of the origins of the IGS”, Proceedings of the 8^th International Conference on Geosynthetics, Yokohama, Japan, September 2006, Vol. 1, pp. 3-6.

In 1985, when Geosyntec was still called GeoServices, as I was working in London with Tensar for the development of geogrids, I received a call from my partner Joe Fluet who said that he got an interesting project in Vermont. There was leakage in two geomembrane-lined reservoirs. It was urgent, and he had changed my return flight from London to Miami so I would fly from London to Boston instead. He added that he would meet me at the Boston airport and we would have to wait three hours for a flight to Vermont. I landed in Boston where I met Joe and, as we were going to wait for the next flight, I realized I needed to shave to be prepared to meet with the client in the evening. I left my jacket and necktie in the waiting lounge and, in shirtsleeves, I looked for a restroom. The restroom close to the waiting lounge was closed for maintenance and I had to walk through the main hall to reach another restroom. In the restroom, I removed my shirt and shaved. When I finished shaving, there was no shirt hanging behind me. I looked everywhere in the restroom: clearly, there was no shirt. I ran as fast as I could through the main lobby of Boston airport to go back to the waiting lounge. People present in the waiting lounge were very surprised to see me when I came back to the waiting lounge with no shirt on. I explained what happened, and I put on the jacket and the necktie that I had left in the waiting lounge. Joe said “Stay here and I will buy a shirt; there must be a shop somewhere in the airport”. While waiting for Joe to return with a new shirt, I started thinking about what could have happened. I remembered that there was a young military shaving next to me in the restroom. I thought that, maybe, he had taken my shirt by mistake because, probably, his shirt was hanging next to mine. Therefore I had to find a military in this airport: not easy! I thought that he was shaving because he needed to be presentable as he was returning to the army base. Therefore, I thought that he might be out on the sidewalk, just outside the airport, waiting for some military transportation. But I thought that military transportation would not be mobilized for just one young military, so, perhaps, there was a group of militaries. And finding a group of militaries on a sidewalk would be easier than finding a single military in the entire Boston airport. This was my only chance to find the military who had potentially taken my shirt. Therefore, dressed with my jacket and my necktie but no shirt, I rushed outside the airport. There, I saw a group of twenty blue-uniformed militaries waiting on the sidewalk. I walked to them and tried to attract their attention. First, they made fun at me because I was dressed with a jacket, a necktie and no shirt. I managed to obtain some silence from them and I explained what happened. I was so convincing that one of them, who appeared to be the highest-ranking, asked if any of them had been shaving in a restroom. Two of them acknowledged they had been and he asked them to open their bags, and in one of them there was a blue shirt with the letters JPG embroidered on it. The group was totally stunned by what happened and, while they all were mocking the culprit, I put my shirt on and I came back to the waiting lounge where all people waiting for the flight applauded me. This unlikely success resulted from the sequence of observation, deduction and action: observation of the presence of a military in the restroom, a presence to which I had paid no attention when I was shaving but was somehow etched in my memory; then investigation including a series of rational deductions; and, finally, the action that was dictated by the investigation.

Being a believer in universalism, I have always been a promoter of the SI system of units, which is, with music, the most universal language. In the 1980s, I was active in the development of standards for geotextiles by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and I made sure that the SI unit was the preferred unit. The only time I was interrupted by an audience applause (as in a political meeting) was at the closing session of the Third International Conference on Geotextiles, in Vienna, when I said “An international society should have an international language. At the IGS, we have agreed to speak English although more than one half of our members do not have English as their mother tongue. In exchange, all members of the geotextile community must agree to use the SI system of units. It is unacceptable, in a modern discipline, that one third of our members still measure geotextiles with their feet.” Impressed by the applause, an eminent American colleague told me he had never realized before that the use of different units by American colleagues was resented to that degree by international colleagues. As I was extensively travelling internationally in the 1970s and 1980s, I was upset by the fact that, in all international flights, the flight data (altitude, speed, distance, temperature) were displayed in English with American units and in the local airline language in SI units. In those days, forms were available on board to express complaints. I filled dozens of those forms explaining that the majority of passengers in international flights were fluent in English and in the SI system but were rarely fluent in the local language, and certainly did not understand feet, miles, Fahrenheit degrees, etc. Clearly the airlines ignored the needs of the majority of their customers, which is a major commercial mistake. I explained that a third option was necessary: displays in English with the SI system. This finally happened and is now the rule. It is likely that I was not the only one complaining, but I did contribute to this promotion of the SI system.

In the 1980s, I knew a Dutch engineer who, like most educated Dutch people of his generation, was fluent in both English and French. He had attended several of my lectures on geotextiles and geomembranes in France. One day he attended a lecture I made in English in the United States. In those days my English was not what it is today and I was very surprised when he told me that my lectures in English were clearer than my lectures in French. I replied: “this is impossible, I am perfectly fluent in French of course and certainly not in English”. He rightfully responded: “I am sorry, but when you present lectures in French, you use a number of colloquial words that I do not understand”. He then added “my French is sufficiently good to understand classical French but not colloquial expressions that change all the time”. This was a very good lesson for me, because of course in English I was unable to depart from classical English and I would certainly not be able to use colloquial expressions. This good lesson led me to always use simple language, likely to be understood by all whether I speak and write, in English or French.

When I was president of the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS), then called International Geotextile Society, I was chairing a council meeting in Tokyo, Japan. In the council of the IGS we had council members from many different countries and that posed some problems of understanding. Of course all meetings were in English but different council members had different command of the English language. In such circumstances our British colleagues very often did not realize that other people around the table were not as fluent in English as they themselves were. During that meeting in Tokyo, one of our British colleagues, quite knowledgeable but talking a lot, started an interminable speech. The secretary general of the IGS, Guy Massenaux, who was seated next to me, realized that most participants could not understand our British colleague who was speaking too fast, was using a number of colloquial expressions and, worse, was making allusions to events that only a person watching the BBC daily could understand. Guy Massenaux talked to my ear and said “Mr. President” (because he was always extremely ceremonial) “could you please interrupt our distinguished British colleague so I could translate what he said so far into international English”. This was a good lesson for all of us regardless of our degree of command of the English language.

When I was chairman of Geosyntec Consultants I tried to know all members of the growing company. In particular when we hired new engineers I always wanted to meet them, immediately if it was in the Geosyntec office where I was working, or later when I had an opportunity to visit other offices. So, one day a senior engineer brings a new hire in my office and I start talking with him. After some mundane talk, the new hire felt comfortable and I told him “I am always right.” The new hire was a little surprised by my statement and, after a few seconds, he replied “Well, this is normal because you are the boss.”  I said “No. I am always right because, if you have an idea or a solution better than mine, I change my mind and I adopt your idea or solution. This is why I am always right.”  So the new hire laughed and said “Great that makes it easy to work with you”. I said “No. This makes it difficult to work with me.” The new hire said he did not understand why. I replied “It is difficult to work with me because you must be able to convince me. You must understand that my idea or my solution are based on a rational analysis, knowledge, experience, etc. Therefore, my idea or my solution are probably not too bad. So I can only change my mind if you are really good and propose really good ideas or solutions.”  The new hire commented: “It appears that working with you is a permanent challenge. I am very pleased, because this is why I wanted to join Geosyntec.”  Then, the new hire, who obviously felt comfortable as a result of this lively and open discussion, explained that this discussion was consistent with what he had heard about Geosyntec. Clearly, he had understood why talented people with their strong personalities are pleased to work together when they are considered equal regardless of their seniority. He left my office knowing he would be treated like me and that I wanted to be treated like him.

I met only once professor Ronald Scott of Caltech. He was the author of the famous book “Principles of Soil Mechanics”. We were both on a consulting panel for a project in California. Scott was a little late and when he came there was an empty seat next to me around the table. The meeting was not good and rather boring, and I took this opportunity to talk to Scott which I had never met before. I said obviously that I was honored to meet him and I also said “I learned soil mechanics from your book”. He replied “me too”.

In all occasions when I presented the Terzaghi Lecture, I mentioned the following anecdote. One day I was presenting a short course on filters in the United States. At the end, a senior geotechnical engineer came to me and said “you remind me of Karl Terzaghi”. I replied I was extremely flattered and I asked why he said that. The senior geotechnical engineer said “I saw Karl Terzaghi only once and, like you, he was talking about filters with a European accent”. I would then say, in the Terzaghi Lecture presentation, “and now I will talk about filters with a European accent”.