Sunday, September 18, 2022

When don't you disturb a broom? When it's sweeping.

Ok, this one is long, but it is really well told.  If you are just looking for a punch line or a giggle, skip to the end.

I will say my vote is on Civil Engineer.  I've seen too many systems built that were inherently flawed.  Those undersea mounts in the middle of the Atlantic near the Azores that threaten to flood the entire east coast of Los Estados Unidos if a well placed earthquake hits are a good example.

 

What kind of engineer is god?

At the bar the other week, I overheard an interesting conversation between three engineers discussing religion. Specifically, they were debating which type of engineer God was.

"I'm telling you," the first one said, "God is a mechanical engineer. It's obvious! Have you ever studied the human skeletal structure, the way our bones fit together, our padded joints, all working together in tandem with our muscles to provide optimized power delivery? 

We even have built in water cooling. Sure, there's wear and tear on the body as time goes on, but that's the nature of the field, and increasingly, our parts are replaceable, even the padding between our bones! I am telling you, God knew what they were doing when they built us - not only a mechanical engineer, but a mechanical engineer par excellence!"

This made the woman sitting across from her laugh very hard, but the man sitting to her left only cocked an eyebrow. "Are you serious?" he said. "'The mechanical engineering of the human body,' that's what impresses you? Knee replacements? 

Tell me, have you ever studied the complexity of the human eye, how signals are transported down the optical nerve to the frontal cortex, where they're processed, synthesized with the rest of our sensory data, and converted not only into an image, but a descriptive understanding of our surroundings? 

As if that weren't enough of a marvel, it's all part of a feedback system, where that information is used to make decisions, and feed the brain more information - a contained, self-sustaining electronic marvel. Your mechanical spine is nothing more than a support structure for the complex nervous system which governs everything you do. The brain is the true miracle of the human body, I'm telling you. God was an electrical engineer whose talent we can only aspire to."

The first engineer frowned at that, and for a moment was deep in thought, trying to come up with a retort. But the engineer across from her was laughing again, even harder at this story than the first one. "Just what is so funny?" she asked. "Whose side are you on here?"

The third engineer struggled to regain her composure, her laugh only trailing off slowly, with effort. Wiping a tear from her eye, she said, "I'm laughing because you two clearly haven't been in this job long enough yet, you have no perspective. 

'God's a mechanical engineer par excellence!' 'Oh, we can only aspire to be electrical engineers as great as God!'" She started laughing again, but regained control over herself. 

"You want to know what kind of engineer God is? Don't look at the propaganda, the 'miracles' of the human body, the pamphlets and blue prints they show the investors to get approval. Look at the as-built documents, the messy, ugly reality of what it all really amounts to in the end. That's how I know God is a civil engineer - who else would put the sewer drainage point in a recreational area?"

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