I had a thought about the pencil versus crash argument and I suspect her choice of extremes might have been better the reason was quite simple.
Remember she was talking, probably over a telephone, to a journalist who was going to write to an uninformed public. How was she to explain the critical nature or her job compared with the much more benign conditions of a pencil pusher?
Taken out of context, as Joan Blunty did, it looks crass. In the context of two understandable extremes it looks much more relevant.