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Three men: a project manager, a software engineer, and a hardware engineer are helping out on a project. About midweek
they decide to walk up and down the beach during their lunch hour. Halfway up the beach, they stumbled upon a lamp. As they
rub the lamp a genie appears and says "Normally I would grant you three wishes, but since there are three of you, I will grant
you each one wish."
The hardware engineer went first. "I would like to spend the rest of my life living in a huge house in St. Thomas with
no money worries." The genie granted him his wish and sent him on off to St. Thomas.
The software engineer went next. "I would like to spend the rest of my life living on a huge yacht cruising the Mediterranean
with no money worries." The genie granted him his wish and sent him off to the Mediterranean.
Last, but not least, it was the project manager's turn. "And what would your wish be?" asked the genie.
"I want them both back after lunch" replied the project manager.
A mathmatician, a physicist, and an engineer were all given a red rubber ball and told to find the volume.
The mathmatician
carefully measured the diameter and evaluated a triple integral.
The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball
in the water, and measured the total displacement.
The engineer looked up the model and serial numbers in his red-rubber-ball
table.
What's the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?
Mechanical engineers build weapons.
Civil
engineers build targets.
 The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail
in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
Albert Einstein
Scientists at NASA have developed a gun built specifically to launch dead chickens at the windshields of airliners, military
jets and the space shuttle, all traveling at maximum velocity. The idea is to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions
with airborne fowl to test the strength of the windshields.
British engineers heard about the gun and were eager to
test it on the windshields of their new high speed trains. Arrangements were made, and when the gun was fired, the engineers
stood shocked as the chicken hurtled out of the barrel, crashed into the shatterproof shield, smashed it to smithereens, crashed
through the control console, snapped the engineer's backrest in two and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin.
Horrified
Britons sent NASA the disastrous results of the experiment, along with the designs of the windshield, and begged the U.S.
scientists for suggestions. NASA's response was just one sentence, "THAW THE CHICKEN!"
An astronaut in space was asked by a reporter, "How do you feel?"
"How would you feel," the astronout replied, "if you
were stuck here, on top of 20,000 parts each one supplied by the lowest bidder?"
During the heat of the space race in the 1960's, NASA decided it needed a ball point pen to write in the zero gravity confines
of its space capsules.
After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of $1 million. The pen worked and
also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth.
The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.
 If it wasn't for Thomas Alva Edison, we'd all be watching TV to the light of a candle.
Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain.
Michael McClary
An engineer, a mathmatician and an arts graduate were given the task of finding the height of a church steeple (the first
to get the correct solution wins a $1000).
The engineer tried to remember things about differential pressures, but resorted to climbing the steeple and lowering a
string on a plumb bob until it touched the ground and then climbed down and measured the length of the string.
The Mathematician layed out a reference line, measured the angle to the top of the steeple from both ends and worked out
the height by trigonometry.
However, the arts graduate won the prize. He bought the vicar a beer in the local pub and he told him how high the church
steeple was.
The great mathematician John Von Neumann was consulted by a group who was building a rocket ship to send into outer space.
When he saw the incomplete structure, he asked, "Where did you get the plans for this ship?"
He was told, "We have our
own staff of engineers."
He disdainfully replied: "Engineers! Why, I have complete sewn up the whole mathematical theory
of rocketry. See my paper of 1952."
Well, the group consulted the 1952 paper, completely scrapped their 10 million
dollar structure, and rebuilt the rocket exactly according to Von Neumann's plans. The minute they launched it, the entire
structure blew up. They angrily called Von Neumann back and said: "We followed your instructions to the letter. Yet when we
started it, it blew up! Why?"
Von Neumann replied, "Ah, yes; that is technically known as the blow-up problem -
I treated that in my paper of 1954."
Raymod Smullyan, "What Is the Name of This Book?"
An engineering student is walking along when a fellow student arrives on a new bicycle. Impressed, he asks, "Where did
you got this beautiful bicycle?"
"Well," the second engineering student says, "A couple of days ago I was just walking along when this georgeous blonde
pulls up, hops off the bike, rips off all her clothes, and says 'take what you want'."
The other engineering student nods and says "Good choice. The clothes probably wouldn't have fit."
Three freshman engineering students were sitting around talking between classes, when one brought up the question of who
designed the human body.
One of the students insisted that the human body must have been designed by an electrical engineer because of the perfection
of the nerves and synapses.
Another disagreed, and exclaimed that it had to have been a mechanical engineer who designed the human body. The system
of levers and pullies is ingeniuos.
"No," the third student said "your both wrong. The human body was designed by an architect. Who else but an architect would
have put a toxic waste line through a recreation area?"
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Doctors bury their mistakes, architects just plant ivy.
A shorter version of the same saying
Lawyers hang their blunders, doctors bury theirs, architects plant vines and teachers send theirs into politics.
A longer version of the same saying
Top Ten Things Engineering School didn't Teach You
- There are at least 10 types of capacitors.
- Theory tells you how a circuit works, not why it does not work.
- Not everything works according to the specs in the databook.
- Anything practical you learn will be obsolete before you use it, except the complex math, which you will never use.
- Engineering is like having an 8 a.m. class and a late afternoon lab every day for the rest of your life.
- Overtime pay? What overtime pay?
- Managers, not engineers, rule the world.
- Always try to fix the hardware with software.
- If you like junk food, caffeine and all-nighters, go into software.
- Dilbert is not a comic strip, it's a documentary.
A start-up engineer is someone who solves a problem you didn't know you had, in a way you don't understand.
After Receiving an Invitation to an Inventors' Ball:
 Edison thought it would be an illuminating experience.
Watt reckoned it would be a good way to let off steam.
Stephenson thought the whole idea was loco.
Wilbur Wright accepted, provided he and Orville could get a flight.
Morse's reply: "I'll be there on the dot. Can't stop now must dash."
Pick-Up Lines to use on Engineering Chicks
 I won't stop bugging you until I get the address of your home page.
Let's convert our potential energy to kinetic energy.
Wanna come back to my room and see my 166mhz Pentium?
How about you and I go back to my place and form a covalent bond?
You're sweeter than glucose.
We're as compatible as two similar Power Macintoshes.
Wanna see the programs in my HP-48GX?
Your body has the nicest arc length I've ever seen.
You're hotter than a bunsen burner set to full power!
My love for you is like a concave up function because it is always increasing.
Real Engineers consider themselves well dressed if their socks match.
Real
Engineers buy their spouses a set of matched screwdrivers for their birthday.
Real engineers
have a non-technical vocabulary of 800 words.
Real Engineers repair their own cameras, telephones,
televisions, watches, and automatic transmissions.
Real Engineers say "It's 70 degrees Fahrenheit,
25 degrees Celsius, and 298 Kelvin" and all you say is "Isn't it a nice day?"
Real Engineers wear
badges so they don't forget who they are. Sometimes a note is attached saying "Don't offer me a ride today. I drove my own
car".
Real Engineers' politics run towards acquiring a parking space with their name on it and
an office with a window.
Real Engineers know the "ABC's of Infrared" from A to B.
Real
Engineers know how to take the cover off of their computer, and are not afraid to do it.
Real Engineers'
briefcases contain a Phillips screwdriver, a copy of "Quantum Physics", and a half of a peanut butter sandwich.
Real
Engineers don't find the above at all funny.
The Dictionary: what engineers say and what they mean by it
- Major Technological Breakthrough
- Back to the drawing board.
- Developed after years of intensive research
- It was discovered by accident.
- The designs are well within allowable limits
- We just made it, stretching a point or two.
- Test results were extremely gratifying
- It works, and are we surprised!
- Customer satisfaction is believed assured
- We are so far behind schedule that the customer was happy to get anything at all.
- Close project coordination
- We should have asked someone else; or, let's spread the responsibility for this.
- Project slightly behind original schedule due to unforeseen difficulties
- We are working on something else.
- The design will be finalized in the next reporting period
- We haven't started this job yet, but we've got to say something.
- A number of different approaches are being tried
- We don't know where we're going, but we're moving.
- Extensive effort is being applied on a fresh approach to the problem
- We just hired three new guys; we'll let them kick it around for a while.
- Preliminary operational tests are inconclusive
- The darn thing blew up when we threw the switch.
- The entire concept will have to be abandoned
- The only guy who understood the thing quit.
- Modifications are underway to correct certain minor difficulties
- We threw the whole thing out and are starting from scratch.
- Essentially complete.
- Half done.
- We predict...
- We hope to God!
- Drawing release is lagging.
- Not a single drawing exists.
- Risk is high, but acceptable.
- 100 to 1 odds, or with 10 times the budget and 10 times the manpower, we may
have a 50/50 chance.
- Serious, but not insurmountables, problems.
- It will take a miracle. God should be the program manager.
- Not well defined.
- Nobody has thought about it.
- Requires further analysis and management attention.
- Totally out of control.
- The project is designed for high availability.
- Malfunctions will be blamed on the operators mistakes.
- This project has low maintenance requirements.
- We wouldn't let the technicians change a light bulb, much less fool around with our baby.
- The software is being developed without excessive process overhead.
- The documentation will be written in clear and lucid Chinese.
- The delivery is scheduled for the last quater of next year.
- This leaves us plenty of time to decide who to blame for it being late.
Engineering Revisited
 Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which
are still under development.
Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.
If you can't fix it -- document it.
The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
How engineers do it...
 Engineers do it with precision.
Electrical engineers are shocked when they do it.
Electrical engineers do it on an
impulse.
Electrical engineers do it with large capacities.
Electrical engineers do it with more frequency and less resistance.
Electrical
engineers do it with more power and at higher frequency.
Mechanical engineers do it with stress and strain.
Mechanical
engineers do it with less energy and greater efficiency.
Chemical Engineers do it in fluidized beds.
City planners do
it with their eyes closed.
Petroleum engineers do it with lubrication.
Reservoir engineers do it thorougly and with
lot of simulation.
Drilling engineers do it with smooth penetration aided by lubrication, frequent short wiper tripps,
and at the end slug is pumped before they pull out.
You Might Be an Engineer if...
your favorite James Bond character is "Q".
- you see a good design and still have to change it.
- you still own a slide rule and you know how to use it.
- your family haven't the foggiest idea what you do at work.
- in college you thought Spring Break was metal fatigue failure.
- you have modified your can-opener to be microprocessor driven.
- you are better with a Karnaugh map than you are with a street map.
- you think the real heroes of "Apollo 13" were the mission controllers.
- you take a cruise so you can go on a personal tour of the engine room.
- you think "cuddling" is simply an unproductive application of heat exchange
- you have owned a calculator with no equal key and know what RPN stands for.
- you make four sets of drawings (with seven revisions) before making a bird bath.
- you have trouble writing anything unless the paper has horizontal and vertical lines.
- your ideal evening consists of fast-forwarding through the latest sci-fi movie looking for technical
inaccuracies.
- you think the value of a book is directly proportionate to the amount of tables, charts and graphs
it contains.
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How many first year engineering students does it take to change a light bulb?
 None. That's a second year subject.
How many second year engineering students does it take to change a light bulb?
One, but the rest of the class copies the report.
How many third year engineering students does it take to change a light bulb?
"Will this question be in the final examination?"
How many civil engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to do it and one to steady the chandelier.
How many electrical engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. They simply redefine darkness as the industry standard.
How many computer engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
"Why bother? The socket will be obsolete in six months anyway."
How many mechanical engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
Five. One to decide which way the bulb ought to turn, one to calculate the force required, one to design a tool with which
to turn the bulb, one to design a comfortable - but functional - hand grip, and one to use all this equipment.
How many nuclear engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
Seven. One to install the new bulb and six to figure out what to do with the old one for the next 10,000 years.
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