Volume 6, Number 7  Friday, February 25, 2005

All You Nerd Is Love

You just don't expect flamingos.

Now, if you're in Florida, you can pretty much expect a flamingo to hand you your order at the drive-through, but when you're strolling across a college campus in St. Louis, coming across a whole flock of the pink things will catch a guy a little off guard -- especially in February. I mean, it's still winter here.

Of course, that's probably why they were wearing the orange scarves.

Yes, as I soon discovered, it's Engineering Week 2005 -- obviously. And while you've no doubt been partying accordingly all week, remember, when I stumbled onto the flamingo field, it was only Monday morning. I wasn't expecting them.

But I suppose I should have been. Even though I have no idea what flamingos have to do with engineering -- or why I should fear the flamingos, as I've many times been warned -- I should know by now that with engineers, you always expect the unexpected.

You see, when I'm not kicking back sipping Cristal here at the State of the Union offices (and here I must embark on a brief tangent to confess to a grammatical conundrum: this column is called The State of the Union. So are our offices the The State of the Union offices, or just the State of the Union offices? I went with the latter this week, but I'd love to get an official ruling on this), I teach Technical Writing to engineering students (making my parenthetical grammatical conundrum all the more ironic, no?).

When I tell people that I teach engineers how to write, their responses usually fall into one of two categories:

1. That's great -- it's so important that engineers know how to write and communicate. This response usually comes from engineers, who have discovered that 80-plus percent of their job involves documentation, and that halfway-decent communication skills can be your hall pass out of the cubicle farm -- at least once or twice a month. These people are also optimists.

2. I'm so sorry. This response usually comes from people who've had to communicate with engineers. These people are somewhat less optimistic.

I am not an engineer by trade -- my degree is in English, which effectively makes me a spy in the house of engineering -- but I nevertheless fall in with the optimists on this one. I truly believe that engineers are capable of communicating with the rest of the English-speaking world. Stop laughing -- I'm totally serious. And in fact, since my extensive exposure to them began, I've come to appreciate the unique, analytical genius of the engineer.

For example, a typical person, when relaying his new phone number, might just send along a mass email with a note that included the new number, and some sort of clever commentary about the situation that necessitated it. But not an engineer. No, an engineer will examine the situation practically, then craft something like the email I got from my friend the other day. After giving us his new number, he wrote:

"Some people apologize for sending mass e-mails. I don't. In fact, I think this is a really good application of e-mail. I encourage you to not apologize for sending mass e-mails anymore either. I mean, how else do you tell 50 people that you have a new phone number? If you're offended that I sent a mass e-mail, please call me."

Sure, I suppose you can't spell "GEEK" without "EE" (and for the oblivious among you, EE is the abbreviation for Electrical Engineering -- though if you're really in the know, you can just call it "Double E"), but there is something strangely heartwarming about such cold, calculating rationality.

And it's not like engineers have no sense of humor about themselves. On Monday, members of the Engineering School Council passed out special EnWeek buttons. One read, "Byte Me"; another, "Kiss Me -- I Understand Rigid Bodies." My favorite of the bunch? "Talk Nerdy To Me."

It gives me the shivers just thinking about it.

But exhibitions of this wry sort of humor are not limited to EnWeek.

In fact, to celebrate Valentine's Day, the Engineering Student Council created special engineer-themed Valentine's cards. One of the cards had a picture of one stick-figure girl, surrounded by five stick-figure guys. The front cover read:

On Valentine's Day for a female engineer:
The odds are good . . .

On the inside, it read:

But the goods are odd.

Another read:

Top 5 Reasons To Be An Engineer's Valentine:
5. Find out what those other buttons on your calculator do
4. We know how to handle stress and strain in our relationships
3. High starting salary
2. Free body diagrams
1. Extremely Good Looking

I don't get the part about body diagrams, really, but that's just the point -- engineers are smart enough to make jokes that the rest of us don't get. But I've discovered that the more you talk to engineers, the more you understand Dilbert cartoons. I now get upwards of 90 percent of them, and my comprehension ratio is increasing by the day.

I still don't understand the flamingos, though. I mean, I understand why they were wearing orange scarves -- it was cold. That, and apparently orange is the official color of engineering. But what exactly flamingos have to do with engineering still escapes me.

Fortunately, there's time to figure it out before the end of EnWeek. In fact, I expect I'll get all the answers I need a little later this morning:

I'm going to the Duct Tape Competition.