A really rotten day at your office

The unfinished obelisk at Aswan
We visited a granite quarry in Aswan when we went to Egypt. I couldn't see at first what the tour guide might possibly have had in mind bringing us to a stone quarry, but it turns out this visit left me with an enduring image.

Whenever I am having a bad day at the office I now think at least I'm not an Egyptian quarry worker.

Egypt along with hieroglyphics and pyramids gave the world the obelisk as a monument to human achievement and victory. We have the Washington Monument, of course. The French got their trade-mark obelisk on the Champs Elysees directly from the Temple of Karnak. Aside from the beauty of these stone columns covered in sculpture and paintings the sheer engineering and technical skill of cutting a block of granite away from the bedrock --with only stone ball-shaped hammers as tools -- then raising and transporting them and polishing them to a sheen is staggering.

At the Aswan quarry workers must have labored for days cutting out a 140-meter-plus block destined to become a world-record-sized monument when one horrible day, one misplaced blow the whole thing cracked.

That had to be one dreadful day at work. Who, as one member of our group asked, had to call and tell the pharaoh and tell him?