Engineering Jobs Keep Dorks Away From The General Public

I need to pass along a transcript of the dorkiest conversation I have ever witnessed or participated in, but first a few key terms:

breech: the end of a launch tube (or gun, for instance) that the ordnance enters

land: a rail or bumper that guides said ordnance on its way out

Now the so dorky it's good part:

I Tell You What: "Alex, is this part actually stowed in the breech land?"

Alex: "Yup"

Ryan, the brand new guy: (cracking up)

I Tell You What: "What's so funny?"

Ryan: (cracking up)

Alex: "Are you all right"

Ryan: (gathering himself enough to speak, barely) "Breechland! It sounds like a magical place."

(All engineers laugh to the point of tears, fade to black)

Maybe you had to be there, maybe not. Suffice to say that our cubicle now has a banner with the names of the occupants and the heading Breechland.

Only at a Monolithic Corporation...

I recently had to pull up stakes and move to another desk about 50 feet away. This was expected, as worker turnover left me sitting alone in a large cubicle meant to comfortably fit 3 people. I got to be king of the hill for a few months, but I finally got my moving orders. I threw away useless documents from my old desk. I threw away useless documents at my new desk from the previous occupants. I was singlehandedly responsible for the destruction or recycling of well over my own body weight in paper from as long as 15 years ago. This, I suppose, is the fleeting value of so many of our efforts. Some engineer toiled to create letters, calculations, arrangements, sketches, material information, or what have you. He (yes, all these documents were from men) may have even worked the weekend or late at night to create them. Maybe he even got a pat on his back from the boss (less likely). And it was sheer vanity. Very few people even remember the names on the documents, let alone who they were or why they or their work is "important". But I digress... I carried my personal possessions, computer, and work stuff over to the new desk. It's much more crowded there, but the company is fine. On Monday, the phone guys finally reassigned my phone number to the outlet at my desk, which was the last step for me to be officially moved in. Probably 20 hours of total work to get relocated, and I can now call it "home away from home". And on Tuesday I was informed that I will be moving again in less than two months, this time to another building. To likely be followed by another move to a different desk on the same floor before the end of the year. Remarkable. I'm sure somebody knows how it makes sense.

What is one way for a wife to show she's awesome? I'll tell you how my Wifey did: watch Predator (on VHS!). Without complaint. Without making snide remarks. Without eye rolling. Well, except for when I would quote TOTALLY RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME lines from the movie. And I'm telling you, there are plenty, such as

"If it bleeds, we can kill it"

If that doesn't make for the best movie 1987 had to offer, then I don't know what does. It features a super lethal alien hunter (I'm with you), Arnold at his vein-popping apex (interesting), Carl Weathers not wearing an Uncle Sam outfit (getting warmer), Jessie "The Body" Ventura (I like it), and a scene where a MINIGUN IS USED TO CUT DOWN TREES (where do I sign up?!?!?!?!?!?). I got all that, and Wifey patiently watching the movie by my side. What more could a man ask for?

How Do You Scold Your Grandfather?

The process of learning, on a fundamental level, can generally be broken into two styles:

• The easy way
• The hard way

I have always been a big fan, philosophically, of the first, but tend to head naturally towards the latter as my "go-to" learning method. Nonetheless, I do try to heed the experiential wisdom of those that have stood at whatever fork in the road that I may be facing. This has paid off especially well in the field of marine engineering. There are too many obscure lessons, too many tricks of the trade, too many shipyard maneuvers that simply cannot be calculated by knowledge accumulated from texts. I like to think that having respect or reverence for the advice of my elders has been one of the keys to a (thus far) reasonably successful and enjoyable career of 7 years.

This approach does not work when you are asked to take the lead. There may be nobody who has done what you are trying to do. Alternately, if things hit the fan and you are in charge, it is your responsibility regardless of who's suggestion the bad idea was. The worst instance of conflict here, though, is when you are asked to check/correct an elder engineer's calculation.

You flip through the pages of the document. It's a wreck. It's crap. The numbers are right, but the approach is crude, the references vague, and all the explanations/assumptions/background details have apparently been compiled using Mad Libs. If a rookie put this on your desk you would just draw giant 'X's across each page with a note saying "do over, and please think this time". But this is no rookie. It is a 68 year old engineer, a former U.S. Marine with over 40 years of engineering experience. He HAS to know what he's talking about, right? The problem can't be with him, you must just not be focusing hard enough. So you dig through his references, dig up extra references he's not using, make leaps of logic, make leaps of faith, and somehow convince yourself that, aside from a few typos (surely that explains all the incomplete sentences), this isn't half bad. Just a little polishing up and this piece of work will be ready to publish. But then your supervisor sees this rose your growing from the pile of manure. And he really does find it to be a piece of something. Back to the drawing board you go.

I was able to explain myself reasonably well in this instance, and I'll work through it. But how does one manage it? How does one develop an on/off switch for RESPECT? How can you hold somebody's advice in high regard and then evaluate their work by assuming none of it is right until explicitly proven otherwise? How do you scold somebody with an established record of performance and could be your grandfather? I clearly haven't figured it out yet.

Co-ed Conundrum

A recent article in Time Magazine discussed a change in tactics for insurgents in Iraq. Incidentally, can we quit calling them terrorists? I want to see us win that war/conflict as badly as Dick Cheney himself, but when somebody lives their entire life in one city, and then fights a foreign army in that city, "terrorist" is the wrong word for him. Alas, I digress. The new tactic is the growing use of females as one-way bombers. Different news outlets say "homicide" or "suicide" bombers, but I think we can agree that the mission is one-way only. This is a startling occurrence in a culture that doesn't even want women to really be seen in public. Of course, women have an easier time penetrating a security screen that forbids males from touching females, and has a stigma against hiring female guards as well. However, I think that this is the sort of thing that the United States needs to win this war. While tactically savvy, this switch by the insurgents is strategically foolish. If confiscating people's personal possessions, forbidding alcohol, and shooting people for things like having the wrong haircut wasn't going to erode Iraqi support for the insurgency in areas of its control, this will. Arab muslims don't even like for their women to have to hold jobs, so does anybody out there suppose having them volunteer to be blown into chunks of parboiled flesh will build support? No, this is a desperate move, and is the sort of thing that will actually make the U.S. and the elected government actually look like a good option to the average Iraqi. Let's hope this is a true sign of the tide turning in our favor.

Confessions of a Bad Person

• I recently was pulling giant vine roots up from our backyard when the time came to go inside and bathe the children. Wifey was out on an errand, and it's normally a fun time for everybody, so this was a good thing. I was pretty dirty from my outdoor labors. I washed my hands, but upon inspection they weren't really "clean" in the literal sense. Should I continue to scrub vigorously so that my precious children have clean hands bathing them? The decision: there is soap involved, so just toss the kids in the tub and we'll all scrub clean together. Not like the kids care, judging by the things of questionable nutritional value that they try to eat when outside.
• I play basketball sometimes with the boy across the street. Matt is about 12 years old, and not particularly good at basketball. He constantly asks me to play, and I do like to oblige sometimes because his own father is pretty sick and definitely is not going to play any basketball any time soon. Normally, I let Matt hang in there, or even get a lead, before "squeaking" out a close victory. The other day, though, he got pretty cocky, and jacked me in the face while I was driving to the hoop. The hit was accidental, for the record, but it's happened a few times before. Now fully motivated, I ripped off about 8 straight points (game to 13 by 1's) and finished the game with a dunk. Of course, this was possible because Matt often lowers his roadside hoop to 7-8 feet from the regulation 10 feet. Still, I dribbled by him, had a clear path to the hoop, and put down a double-clutch, two-handed, thundering, nasty, this-is-how-75-pounds-of-bodyweight-and-10-inches-of-height-bigger-than-you-gets-down. I've never gotten to do that in any sort of game, so it was fun. And Matt got to play basketball, which was good. And he was pretty tired, so I really think he wanted the game to be done. Still, I think my apartment in heaven may have gotten knocked down from a 1 bedroom to a studio for the evil way that I enjoyed winning that game

CSI-Tell-You-What

I arose at 6:00 for a 3 mile run before work this morning, and things were proceeding normally. Feet hitting the pavement at 6:10. About a half-mile from my house, I noticed some awfully strange marks on the sidewalk. Awfully, indeed, as it turns out. I shook it off and kept running, thinking it was just the incomplete light of morning. On the return trip about 15 minutes later, though, it was pretty clear. There were about 15 bloody footprints on the sidewalk. Barefoot footprints of fully dried blood. Not just like somebody had sliced their foot on glass like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, because there were some pretty big splatters, too. It was bad enough that I called the police as soon as I got back to the house. The dispatcher thanked me and said they were actively working the case. I was glad that they were already on it, and that I hadn't just left somebody bleeding in the bushes for an extra 15 minutes while I finished my run, but I also wonder if "actively working" means they haven't caught the perpetrator in our area.
The lesson, as always: Snitches get cut.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2200 miles on the road concentrated over 4 days of driving, highlighted by a 700+ mile voyage back from Port Huron, Michigan. As the highly esteemed Lonesome George once said Riding my rig about 95 Rockin' and a rollin' into overdrive My heart is beatin' like a sledgehammer Dont' you get in the way of this gearjammer We had an MP3 player that had hours and hours of tunes, but if I had just put that one song on a continuous loop I'm certain the cruise would have slowly crept up as we drove and would have shaved a few hours off the trip. I did all the driving on this trip, which worked out great because Wifey is better with the kids, anyway. I brought earplugs in case things got out of hand. No joke. Fortunately, the kids did fantabulous, all things considered. We were all ready to return to our beds when we got back to the Coast. The time we spent in the Great Lakes States was very un-East Coast. We went to a wedding in Pennsylvania. Admittedly, they have weddings in New England, also, but there was line dancing at this one. We also spent a great deal of time at my mother's house, where she has retired to after ending her nursing career.

It was a remarkable setting, 20 acres of pastoral countryside adjacent to the Manistee National Forest. You could step out the door and hear... the breeze and nothing else. Occasionally horses or roosters at an adjacent farm. I ran a 3 mile loop one time, including stretches on main roads, and didn't see a single car or person. There were plenty of chickens at my mothers, 20 to be precise, but they are still juveniles so there are no crowing roosters yet. Sweetness absolutely adored the chickens, so we spent a lot of time catching grasshoppers and other bugs to toss to the chickens. I did not pushing being interested in creepy-crawlies on my daughter, but she sure loves chasing snakes, bugs, frogs, and the like. I even got to spend a little time helping Grandpa Paul erect the coop that the chickens will ultimately call home. Well, except for the surplus male chickens. They're destined for somebody's belly. I'd love to post pictures, but we just got an "update" to Kodak Easyshare software that is making it difficult to upload files. Perhaps I can follow up later.