"Nomen Nescio" ] wrote in message
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From: "Matt Barrow"

Yeah, but the kids in engineering schools didn't have any form of "love
life" in school (and many still don't)

Of course we did!... It just had to occur
between 11pm and 2am on a Saturday
night with no exams scheduled for the
following week.
The tough part is getting through the
"act" without once thinking "Hmm, I
wonder how I could write an equation
that would accurately define the motion
of the bed springs".

True fact: Somewhere, I still have an
old T-shirt that says "Engineers do it
with simple harmonic motion".

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Engineer Identification Test
You walk into a room and notice that a picture is hanging crooked. You...

1.. Straighten it.
2.. Ignore it.
3.. Buy a CAD system and spend the next six months designing a
solar-powered, self-adjusting picture frame while often stating aloud your
belief that the inventor of the nail was a total moron.
The correct answer is "C" but partial credit can be given to anybody who
writes "It depends" in the margin of the test or simply blames the whole
stupid thing on "Marketing".

Social Skills
Engineers have different objectives when it comes to social interaction.

Normal people expect to accomplish several unrealistic things from social
interaction:

a.. Stimulating and thought-provoking conversation
b.. Important social contacts
c.. A feeling of connectedness with other humans
In contrast to normal people, engineers have rational objectives for social
interactions:

a.. Get it over with as soon as possible.
b.. Avoid getting invited to something unpleasant.
c.. Demonstrate mental superiority and mastery of all subjects.
Fascination with Gadgets
To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two
categories:

1.. things that need to be fixed, and
2.. things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to
play with them.
Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily
available, they will create their own problems. Normal people don't
understand this concept; they believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features
yet.

No engineer looks at a television remote control without wondering what it
would take to turn it into a stun gun. No engineer can take a shower without
wondering if some sort of Teflon coating would make showering unnecessary.
To the engineer, the world is a toy box full of sub-optimized and
feature-poor toys.

Fashion and Appearance
Clothes are the lowest priority for an engineer, assuming the basic
thresholds for temperature and decency have been satisfied. If no appendages
are freezing or sticking together, and if no genitalia or mammary glands are
swinging around in plain view, then the objective of clothing has been met.
Anything else is a waste.

Dating and Social Life
Dating is never easy for engineers. A normal person will employ various
indirect and duplicitous methods to create a false impression of
attractiveness. Engineers are incapable of placing appearance above
function.

Fortunately, engineers have an ace in the hole. They are widely recognized
as superior marriage material: intelligent, dependable, employed, honest,
and handy around the house. While it's true that many normal people would
prefer not to date an engineer, most normal people harbor an intense desire
to mate with them, thus producing engineerlike children who will have
high-paying jobs long before losing their virginity.

Male engineers reach their peak of sexual attractiveness later than normal
men, becoming irresistible erotic dynamos in their mid thirties to late
forties. Just look at these examples of sexually irresistible men in
technical professions:

a.. Bill Gates
b.. MacGyver
c.. Etcetera
Female engineers become irresistible at the age of consent and remain that
way until about thirty minutes after their clinical death. Longer if it's a
warm day.

Honesty
Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human
relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from
customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth.

Engineers sometimes bend the truth to avoid work. They say things that sound
like lies but technically are not because nobody could be expected to
believe them. The complete list of engineer lies is listed below:

a.. "I won't change anything without asking you first."
b.. "I'll return your hard-to-find cable tomorrow."
c.. "I have to have new equipment to do my job."
d.. "I'm not jealous of your new computer."
Frugality
Engineers are notoriously frugal. This is not because of cheapness or mean
spirit; it is simply because every spending situation is simply a problem in
optimization, that is, "How can I escape this situation while retaining the
greatest amount of cash?"

Powers of Concentration
If there is one trait that best defines an engineer it is the ability to
concentrate on one subject to the complete exclusion of everything else in
the environment.

This sometimes causes engineers to be pronounced dead prematurely. Some
funeral homes in high-tech areas have started checking resumes before
processing the bodies. Anybody with a degree in electrical engineering or
experience in computer programming is propped up in the lounge for a few
days just to see if he or she snaps out of it.

Risk
Engineers hate risk. They try to eliminate it whenever they can. This is
understandable, given that when an engineer makes one little mistake the
media will treat it like it's a big deal or something.

Examples of Bad Press for Engineers
a.. Hindenberg
b.. Space Shuttle Challenger
c.. SPANet(tm)
d.. Hubble space telescope
e.. Apollo 13
f.. Titanic
g.. Ford Pinto
h.. Corvair
The risk/reward calculation for engineers looks something like this:

RISK:
Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people.
REWARD:
A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.
Being practical people, engineers evaluate this balance of risks and rewards
and decide that risk is not a good thing. The best way to avoid risk is by
advising that any activity is technically impossible for reasons that are
far too complicated to explain.

If that approach is not sufficient to halt a project, then the engineer will
fall back to a second line of defense: "It's technically possible but it
will cost too much."

Ego
Ego-wise, two things are important to engineers:

a.. How smart they are.
b.. How many cool devices they own.
The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the
problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem
until it's solved. No illness or distraction is sufficient to get the
engineer off the case. These types of challenges quickly become personal--a
battle between the engineer and the laws of nature.

Engineers will go without food and hygiene for days to solve a problem.
(Other times just because they forgot). And when they succeed in solving the
problem they will experience an ego rush that is better than sex --and I'm
including the kind of sex where other people are involved.

Nothing is more threatening to the engineer than the suggestion that
somebody has more technical skill. Normal people sometimes use that
knowledge as a lever to extract more work from the engineer. When an
engineer says that something can't be done (a code phrase that means it's
not fun to do), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the
engineer with a look of compassion and pity and say something along these
lines: "I'll ask Bob to figure it out. He knows how to solve difficult
technical problems."

At that point it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between
the engineer and the problem. The engineer will set upon the problem like a
starved Chihuahua on a pork chop.