Engineering Day Funny Quotes

It was a mug. And it had a joke printed on it. It said, Engineers don’t cry. They build bridges and get over it.” Someone laughed then. Isabel or perhaps Gonzalo—I wasn’t sure. With all that crazy banging, my heart had somehow moved up my throat and to my temples, so it was hard to focus on anything besides its beating and Aaron’s voice. “And you know what I did?” he continued, bitterness filling his tone. “Instead of laughing like I wanted to, instead of looking up at her and saying something funny that would hopefully make her give me one of those bright smiles I had somehow already seen her give so freely in the short day I had been around her, I pushed it all down and set the mug on my desk. Then, I thanked her and asked her if there was anything else she needed.” I knew I shouldn’t feel embarrassed, but I was. Just as much as I had been back then, if not more. It had been such a silly thing to do, and I had felt so tiny and dumb after he brushed it away so easily. Closing my eyes, I heard him continue, “I pretty much kicked her out of my office after she went out of her way and got me a gift.” Aaron’s voice got low and harsh. “A fucking welcome gift.” I opened my eyes just in time to watch him turn his head in my direction. Our gazes met. “Just like the big jerk I had advertised myself to be, I ran her out. And to this day, I regret it every time it crosses my mind. Every time I look at her.

So a scientist and an engineer are tossed into separate rooms, stocked with tools and parts, and told that they aren't allowed out until they've produced a working prototype for a radio receiver. After two days, the scientist has covered the walls in scribbling and looks like a mad man, raving about how not only is it impossible to build a receiver with the parts given but that he's proven that radio is theoretically impossible anyway. When they check on the engineer, they find that he'd built the receiver in less than a day, fashioned a crude speaker and antenna, and had found a radio broadcast he liked and hadn't bothered to tell them he'd finished.

One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne

It was a mug. And it had a joke printed on it. It said, Engineers don’t cry. They build bridges and get over it.” Someone laughed then. Isabel or perhaps Gonzalo—I wasn’t sure. With all that crazy banging, my heart had somehow moved up my throat and to my temples, so it was hard to focus on anything besides its beating and Aaron’s voice. “And you know what I did?” he continued, bitterness filling his tone. “Instead of laughing like I wanted to, instead of looking up at her and saying something funny that would hopefully make her give me one of those bright smiles I had somehow already seen her give so freely in the short day I had been around her, I pushed it all down and set the mug on my desk. Then, I thanked her and asked her if there was anything else she needed.” I knew I shouldn’t feel embarrassed, but I was. Just as much as I had been back then, if not more. It had been such a silly thing to do, and I had felt so tiny and dumb after he brushed it away so easily. Closing my eyes, I heard him continue, “I pretty much kicked her out of my office after she went out of her way and got me a gift.” Aaron’s voice got low and harsh. “A fucking welcome gift.” I opened my eyes just in time to watch him turn his head in my direction. Our gazes met. “Just like the big jerk I had advertised myself to be, I ran her out. And to this day, I regret it every time it crosses my mind. Every time I look at her.” He didn’t even blink as he talked, looking straight into my eyes. And I didn’t think I did either. I didn’t think I was even breathing. “All the time I wasted so foolishly. All the time I could have had with her.

Vern did not trust humans was the long and short of it. Not a single one. He had known many in his life, even liked a few, but in the end they all sold him out to the angry mob. Which was why he holed up in Honey Island Swamp out of harm's way. Vern liked the swamp okay. As much as he liked anything after all these years. Goddamn, so many years just stretching out behind him like bricks in that road old King Darius put down back in who gives a shit BC. Funny how things came back out of the blue. Like that ancient Persian road. He couldn't remember last week, and now he was flashing back a couple thousand years, give or take. Vern had baked half those bricks his own self, back when he still did a little blue-collar. Nearly wore out the internal combustion engine. Shed his skin two seasons early because of that bitch of a job. That and diet. No one had a clue about nutrition in those days. Vern was mostly ketogenic now, high fat, low carbs, apart from his beloved breakfast cereals. Keto made perfect sense for a dragon, especially with his core temperature. Unfortunately, it meant that beer had to go, but he got by on vodka. Absolut was his preferred brand. A little high on alcohol but easiest on the system.

Google tried to do everything. It proved itself the deepest and fastest of the search engines. It stomped the competition in email. It made a decent showing in image hosting, and a good one in chat. It stumbled on social, but utterly owned maps. It swallowed libraries whole and sent tremors across the copyright laws. It knows where you are right now, and what you’re doing, and what you’ll probably do next. It added an indelible, funny, loose-limbed, and exact verb into the vocabulary: to google. No one “bings” or “yahoos” anything. And it finishes your sen … All of a sudden, one day, a few years ago, there was Google Image Search. Words typed into the search box could deliver pages of images arrayed in a grid. I remember the first time I saw this, and what I felt: fear. I knew then that the monster had taken over. I confessed it, too. “I’m afraid of Google,” I said recently to an employee of the company. “I’m not afraid of Google,” he replied. “Google has a committee that meets over privacy issues before we release any product. I’m afraid of Facebook, of what Facebook can do with what Google has found. We are in a new age of cyberbullying.” I agreed with him about Facebook, but remained unreassured about Google." (from "Known and Strange Things" by Teju Cole)

But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate–For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too–As I'll show–It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism–Says Dave "People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles–Isnt that amazing?give me a little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, "The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?"–The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one–In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip–Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, "Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?"–"Let's go tell him right now!"–"Why of course if we wait another minute...and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!"–We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner. (Big Sur, Chap. 11)

The Daring Bicyclist Jim was always trying different things.  On this particular day he decided he wanted to see how fast a person could ride a bicycle before it became too hard to ride. So he asked a friend if he could tie his bike to the bumper of his car as he drove faster and faster.  His friend agreed. Before they got going they agreed on a way to communicate.  Jim would ring the bell on his bicycle once if he wanted to go faster, twice if the speed was good and repeatedly if he wanted to go slower. So the two adventurers took off and things were going pretty well.  The driver got up to over 50 miles per hour and Jim was able to handle that speed, following along on his bike. All of a sudden a shiny red sports car came up from behind.  The driver pulled alongside and revved up his engine as if he wanted to race.  Jim’s friend accepted the challenge and started to speed up.  He went faster and faster and soon forgot all about poor Jim tied to his bumper. A little way down the road, as the cars raced side by side, a policeman with a radar gun sat and watched as they sped past.  The policeman clocked them at 99 miles per hour. Before the policeman started to pursue the speeding cars, he reported in to headquarters on his radio.  “You are not going to believe this,” the policeman said.  “I am about to go after two cars racing down the road doing almost 100 miles per hour and there is this guy on a bicycle riding behind them waving his arms and ringing a bell trying to pass them!

In 1984, I had another conversation that had underscored this point to me. Herb Okun, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, had come to his post after serving as US ambassador to communist East Germany. “What’s it like there, Herb?” I had asked him. “Oh, nothing much,” Herb answered. “They live in dilapidated housing, drive funny little Trabants, drink vodka all day while watching eight hours of West German television.” “What!” I asked in disbelief. “What did you just say?” “They watch eight hours of West German television every day and then drink themselves to sleep,” he repeated. “You mean to tell me that watching eight hours a day of West German television doesn’t have any effect on them?” I asked incredulously. “None that I can see,” Okun answered. “Herb,” I said, “that can’t be. It’s just a question of time until the cracks will appear.” The conversation made me recall an engineering course I took at MIT. We loaded a small model bridge with steadily increasing loads and photographed the process. The bridge held fine, until it suddenly collapsed. Yet upon closer examination of the film we could see tiny cracks propagating in the structure well before the fall.

She seemed sad and wise beyond her years. All the giddy experimentation with sex, recreational drugs, and revolutionary politics that was still approaching its zenith in countercultural America was ancient, unhappy history to her. Actually, her mother was still in the midst of it—her main boyfriend at the time was a Black Panther on the run from the law—but Caryn, at sixteen, was over it. She was living in West Los Angeles with her mother and little sister, in modest circumstances, going to a public high school. She collected ceramic pigs and loved Laura Nyro, the rapturous singer-songwriter. She was deeply interested in literature and art, but couldn’t be bothered with bullshit like school exams. Unlike me, she wasn’t hedging her bets, wasn’t keeping up her grades to keep her college options open. She was the smartest person I knew—worldly, funny, unspeakably beautiful. She didn’t seem to have any plans. So I picked her up and took her with me, very much on my headstrong terms. I overheard, early on, a remark by one of her old Free School friends. They still considered themselves the hippest, most wised-up kids in L.A., and the question was what had become of their foxy, foulmouthed comrade Caryn Davidson. She had run off, it was reported, “with some surfer.” To them, this was a fate so unlikely and inane, there was nothing else to say. Caryn did have one motive that was her own for agreeing to come to Maui. Her father was reportedly there. Sam had been an aerospace engineer before LSD came into his life. He had left his job and family and, with no explanation beyond his own spiritual search, stopped calling or writing. But the word on the coconut wireless was that he was dividing his time between a Zen Buddhist monastery on the north coast of Maui and a state mental hospital nearby. I was not above mentioning the possibility that Caryn might find him if we moved to the island.

Thus when Hiroko came up and said, “Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position,” Nadia sang to her, “That’s the only thing I’m thinking of— baby!” and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. “The engineer’s solution,” she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn’t hammer a nail straight. And that night she talked over the day’s work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” chasing her off to sleep.