Oh, Engineers

"Here the Epydoc might be of little more help. I added sample of how to create the followerload from an lmm file. You may want to use the tags about this code snippet to emphasize that."

Um, what?

The quote that comes to mind is from Finding Nemo: "It's like he's trying to speak to me, I know it!"

Engineers may be brilliant, but they really are hopeless when it comes to transferring that brilliance to others. In some ways, they're almost a different species from the rest of us. Seriously. How many fast-food workers or authors do you know who get down on their hands and knees with a measuring tape and mark with tape exactly where the furniture should go so that A) it's centered and B) it is in the right position for optimal hearing and watching pleasure? Hand on my heart, I have watched my dad do this every time we move. You have no idea how tempted I've been to go and just scoot the couch a few inches to one side to see if he notices.

And then there's the tendency to fix everything, regardless of whether it's broken or not. Especially if it isn't broken. We have a huge hole behind our ground-floor toilet (apparently someone had to go just a little too badly... or.... something. Don't ask me how it got there) that's been on the "to fix" list for at least a year. Yet on my dad's day off, he decides to try to run an extended ethernet cord from the study to the family room, just so that, should the fancy strike him, he can plug my computer in and listen to my music on the "superior" sound system. For lack of anything to do, I end up helping him, and the whole process ends up taking us several hours and included three new holes in the wall (one of them unnecessary -- that bugged him SO much because he miscalculated the location of the hole and how big it needed to be).

All so that I could just sit on the couch, plug in my earphones, and listen to my music on my own. Hooray, Dad! He still has yet to benefit from my luscious music samples, and I don't think he's a fan of my kinds of music anyway. Never have I been so proud.

Now today, I talked to the guys I work for and explained (very clearly I thought) that I needed an explanation of some feature or other in the program we're developing so that I can document it. And I needed it in plain English. Then I get that little doosie of an explanation at the top. *headdesk* That, my friends, is not plain English. Oh right. I forgot who I was talking to.

Based on the stories above, it might be surprising to discover that engineers love to be efficient. They're obsessed with efficiency, actually. Even taking the time to measure furniture location makes sure that all the soundwaves bouncing around the room are absorbed most efficiently by human ears. And rerouting the ethernet cord would have been efficient had we decided to use my music collection as our primary source of listening material. This also extends to their word choices. A few examples:

"Gooey" -- it must have taken me at least a year of working for them to figure out what the heck they meant when they said this. Eventually I learned that it was what they called the Graphical User Interface (G.U.I). Aha. Gooey. Because just saying G-U-I was too long. You save one syllable if you say "gooey." Gooey it is, then. Makes it sound like it's going to drip out of the screen and attack you...

Everything is shortened, even if it's been shortened in the past. For example, one of the products is called LumbarSIM, which is short for LumbarSimulator. My boss called it LSim yesterday. What next? "Sim?" or, maybe to make it more unique, we'll call it "Lim." Start printing up the bumper stickers, boys, I think we have a winner.

They also tend to speak in code rather than bother with translating to normal speech. It's never "Make that a hyperlink to your formatting page," it's "Make sure you link href that to the css file." If you understand that, kudos to you. I only do because I've had it said to me too many times. Don't forget to ctrl+C and export that into your long-term memory under the h1

"Things to Remember When Talking to an Engineer."

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Totally just typed h1 up there and it converted to the heading format. That's awesome. Oh man, it's taking over my life.

Don't get me wrong. I love engineers. Heck, I'll probably end up marrying one. But if anyone ever comes up to you and starts talking about a CAD system, all I can say is smile and nod politely and then never ever bring up computers or the word virtual around them ever again.