Ed. Note: Most of us have heard the story about the farm wife who would always cut off both ends of the roast before she put in the oven. When her daughter asked her why she cut them off, she said that her mother had always done it that way, so she did it, too. They asked Grandma later why she had cut off the perfectly OK ends of the roast. “The roast wouldn’t fit my pan,” Grandma said, “unless I cut the ends off first.” It’s a story often used to demonstrate how beaucracies sometime get a life of their own. For all you metaphor collectors out there, here’s another:

A HISTORY LESSON

Subject: Railroad Tracks

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in
England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines
were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and
that’s the gauge they used.

Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then? Because the people who built the
tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd 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 Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts,
which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon
wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a Specification/ Procedure/ Process and
wonder ‘What horse’s ass came up with it ? You may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the
rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses’ asses.) 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, or SRBs.The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their
factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred
to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs 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, and the SRBs had to fit through
that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the
railroad track, asyou now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what isarguably the world’s most advanced transportation systemwas determined over two thousand years ago by the widthof a horse’s ass. And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important?