It’s hard to express what it’s like to be an engineer to the non-technical minds. Some say it’s a calling, others think it’s a curse because you find yourself looking at things and thinking how you might do it better or differently. You know who you are. You’re the ones who go out with friends to a (fill in the blank), restaurant, movie theater, shopping mall, and find yourself wondering why things –like the cooking grill, the movie projector, the rolling LED display – are designed the way they are, or how they work. You want to use a screwdriver and take things apart because you need to know.
Engineers are the doctors of the electro-mechanical world because they like to fix things. However, we also like to optimize, whether it’s the cost or the manufacturing sequence we like to get the best return for the effort expended.
But the reality of being an engineer is that you have to participate in the everyday hubbub of meetings. Typically, we don’t like these because they are not as productive as our engineering tasks – our real job. My engineering son recently sent me a link to this video (from the FailBlog site) that expresses so perfectly, the difficulty of meetings between engineers and non-engineers. What do you think (but stop laughing before you respond.)?
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