Summary form only given. The paper states that as engineering managers we're all caught on the horns of the same dilemma. We want to climb the slippery corporate pole, but in doing so we get further and further away from why we became engineers in the first place. It's called 'ghost' work, and we all do it. It's that niggling, depressing stuff that we have to get off our desks in order to be perceived to be doing our jobs properly. As engineering managers we spend most of our time writing reports, administrating employment issues, dealing with compliance legislation and writing even more reports. At best it's tedious pen-pushing. At worst it's simply not what we were put on the planet to do. The reason we feel like this is that we are supposed to make things, design things, repair things. That's why we did our vocational degrees in the various engineering disciplines. But today, as we sit in our rabbit hutches signing requisitions for photocopier toner and haggling over how much holiday can be passed on into the New Year, we've never been so far away from getting our hands dirty. The dilemma can be summed up as 'manual versus mental'.