Horny or horned - delightful Engineers

Today, the chronicler opened this blog to write on a matter he mulled over for some while and which probably took shape just recently. Lest his acute memory should fail him, he documents it as part of this blog.

Recently, in a wedding, I met a young colleague of mine, Shilpa, who introduced me to her brother who had come along to the party. The guy had typical features with heavy facial hair and was looking quite frustrated. When Shipla told me that he was pursuing his engineering, the fellow seemed to wince a little and I surmised that the reason for his frustration was that he had chosen the wrong profession.

The fellow was thin, dark and looked as if he was either totally drunk or had forgotten to shave for months. Either way he looked really sad. Looking at his pathetic state, I decided not to comment on his appearance and cause myself to be added to his personal hate list and proceeded to give the chap a friendly handshake. However, it appeared that he was too busy toying with the idea of stealing away for a while so that he could enjoy some liqour. Although I was interested in the idea myself, prudence prevailed and I decided not to ask him lest he should take it seriously and assume that I was into drugs as well.

For some while the group was standing and talking about the way we wriggled our vehicles into the parking and soon we drifted to the idea that engineering is perhaps the worst of all professions, perhaps because more than just one person had noticed the serious frustrated expression on this tight chap's guise. In my usual oratorial style, I added my comments after clearing my throat in a majestic way as if I were about to deliver a speech on World peace. "If I were to enumerate the main branches of professions, the ones that I can readily recall, are medicine, law, accounting, engineering, and banking. Among these, in my opinion the engineer is perhaps the most frustrated and perhaps finds it most uncomfortable to socialize." The fact is that unless an engineer has a magnetic personality like mine, he tends to blend with the rest of the environment, losing his own identity and assuming that of the mob.

Perhaps the one place where engineers will find themselves most uncomfortable is a party or a social gathering of people from various backgrounds. I attended one such party a while back, when I found that the majority of the people surrounding me were not engineers. Owing to my magnetic personality, an attractive young female Sonia, approached me. I was unable to categorize her reaction as either contempt or amazement, when she raised her eyebrows upon knowing that I'm an engineer. I normally prefer to use a simple title like that, lest I should scare away lay people with "VLSI Design Engineer". The woman then proceeded to discuss what she did and never did she ever care to ask me anything else except if I would join her for some gin and tonic, for which I was always game.

It is not very difficult to understand why an engineer would never be asked about his profession in social circles. A person's profession - and consequently the person himself - would be considered interesting only if, he or his profession could be of any use to lay people or if people have some general knowledge about his profession. For example a doctor could be of use to anyone having fits in a party and he could also talk endlessly of the human anatomy and the organs that he cuts apart, without boring an audience. An accountant could be of use to all those who wish to save on income tax and a banker is an exciting person to talk to for all those that wish to invest their money. When I thought about it from this point of view, I realized that an engineer, and especially one of my kind, would probably never be asked about my profession, since neither is there adequate general knowledge of the subject among people, nor do we do anything worthwhile for laymen to understand. In fact it is only in a clique of engineers, that one of my kinds would feel in place, which is the reason why most engineers set a perfect example of the saying "Birds of a feather, flock together".

Returning back to our wedding party where I met this queer young man, we also discussed that engineers are probably even abnormally horny. Lest I should appear very prurient to my colleagues, I employed witty euphemism and simply remarked that "there are very few women that turn out to be engineers". The truth of the matter is however that most engineers are sexually frustrated, sometimes perverted and mostly virgin, probably due to the paucity in young attractive women that youngsters their age, would like to flirt with. Sometimes, I wonder why some engineers act like complete morons salivating like mad dogs when they see a woman passing by. Yet, the only emotion that such a sight evokes in me is that of pity, for both the women and the men - the women, because of the cheap company they have to deal with and the men, because of their lack of class. Still, I being an engineer myself am healthily horny! Considering the nature of this matter, I shall not discuss it further and shall let it rest in peace.

Engineers are rather queer people and electrical engineers are more than just queer. One professor of electrical engineering in a premier school of engineering in India, could teach his students to write computer algorithms without refering a textbook, but could not repair an electrical fitting in his home. My brother was trying to fix our television set and after several vain attempts called the techician to fix it, who simply slapped it twice to display a perfect picture. If one were to wonder where engineers are of any value, we find that they are perhaps good for nothing.

I digress here to a jovial escapade of a probably fictitious story of a man looking with surprise at the price tags of some monkeys in a pet show. One of them cost $500 and the vendor commented that it could program in C (a meaningless mix of computer jargon that blokes like me somehow seem to make some sense out of) and the other that cost $50000 could program in Java. What completely shook the man was another perfectly ordinary looking monkey with a price tag of $5 million. When asked the vendor replied, "I don't know what he does, but he calls himself an engineer!". I also draw the reader's attention to another singular event in which an engineer, when called for an interview and asked to add two and two babbled after much deliberation that the result lay between 3.99999 and 4.00001.

Although, as pointed out in this thesis, engineers are not very smart, they still manage to do a few things sensibly, possibly by some stroke of luck or due to their "sheer mastery" over the method of elimination. It is with this short note on the smartness that engineers display in moments when they start using their common sense, that I should appropriately take your leave.


DISCALIMER: If you think any of the above is true or that engineers are truly useless, you need to meet a psychiatrist! The chronicler has no grudges against engineers and it may be noted that he is himself one as patently discussed hereinabove.