The Engineering Curse
As an engineer, I am cursed. Not necessarily because of the fact that I enjoy maths, or my inability to communicate with people effectively, but because I am doomed to love ‘fiddling’ with gadgets.
During a (particularly boring) lecture today a friend of mine started taking apart a rather cool pen (I must admit that I was partially responsible for this because I had put forward an idea as to how it worked, and that just spurred on his curiosity). After taking it apart and proving that neither of us were exactly right, he started the logical process of putting it back together.
This is where things often start going wrong, as it is often easier to keep taking things apart than it is to remember how they go back together and in what order. And this is where things went wrong this time. I must say, though, that it did make the remainder of the lecture much more interesting, as we watched him strive to put the pen’s workings back together.
As an engineer I think we’re stuck in this vicious cycle for the rest of our lives. I’m not saying that we have low latent inhibition (like that Scofield fellow off Prison Break), but rather we have the compulsion to figure out how and why things work, and whether we can make them work better.
This again struck me reasonably recently when I was at an assembly facility located here in Melbourne. While the plant was shut down for lunch, I had a wander around the plant and I found myself having to consciously cross my arms in order to avoid playing with all the buttons and switches. Normally I’m not so restrained, but I didn’t particularly feel like postpoining an entire day’s productivity because I played with the pretty buttons.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:44 am
im cursed, like most engineers, we ain’t too good at sports, so when we do play we either don’t make the grade or fracture our ankles easily when we play brilliant games and spend the next week horizontal (no, not downtown either willzie) and high on panadine forte, to the point where the balloon of a thing that you once considered your ankle/foot/knee has forced the doctor to say “hey don’t study for your midsemester, i forbid you to do it.”
and i’m of the opinion poor engineers work out how it goes back together after they have pulled it apart… after all your supposed to be good a piecing the puzzle together, not working out someone else’s solution
May 12th, 2007 at 2:45 am
is this it? that you are inherently better at taking things apart than putting them back together? thereby making you question whether or not you are spending your life absorbed in valuable (and valid) occupation?
May 12th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Umm, I don’t think so…? I was merely trying to convey the immutable desire I have to take everything apart. There’s no doubt that I’m absorbed in a valuable occupation (where would the world be without engineers?), my concern is mainly for my mental health in cases when I am unable to take interesting things apart.
May 13th, 2007 at 1:40 am
or rather when you are unable to put them back together…
May 13th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Interesting. I’d never heard of latent inhibition. I learnt something today.
May 14th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
To sound cliché: You learn something every day GeM!
I didn’t know it was called latent inhibition until I saw it on Prison Break I must confess!
May 14th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Actually, I had never heard of it either. So I guess we all learned something today…. or yesterday or the day before that or whenever.