Re: The engineer's careers
"I would have watched them do it, or at the very least checked after they had done it."
They were too short to do it, so too short to check. I don't want to say anything politically incorrect, but short people are a constant hazard - there is a reason we don't let five year olds drive on motorways.
In the 1970s we used to make short people wear platform shoes to avoid industrial accidents.