Engineer Jokes

On By NeelIn Views and Observations

First off, if you’ve arrived here searching for engineer jokes, you might be disappointed. There is no engineer joke in this post.

So anyway, I don’t get this deal with the newfound arrogance of engineering I see around these days. Facebook’s full of it. There’s a horde of half-geeky slash semi-witty slash pure roundabout humour stuff with uncountable spelling and grammar mistakes being shared around, with a footnote to the effect of ‘Engineers made this. Engineers understand this. If you are not an engineer, you’re too dumb to get this. How superiorly cool is that?’ I’ll give you an example. The following is being circulated with the title ‘Engineers Rockz!!!’:

Engineers Rockz

Do you realize the problems with this kind of talent? Someone told you to establish that your parents were the same person, and you go through this brilliant but painful twisted logic to prove it. Then you take pride in it and share it around. At the same time you ridicule those who failed to accept this oblique suggestion that they owe their birth to what could only be imagined as some really twisted act of  masturbation (which I think explains why engineers must be a different species). Do you see the problem with being able to prove anything you’re asked to? Do you realize that’s a problem? Do you realize that’s giving away ultimate power to whoever asks you to do this? Do you think being able to dish out a solution, any solution, to any question, is awesome? Not. I’d much rather be the commerce or medical student.

And then this, the awesome ‘Engineer’s clock. Only engineers will understand this.’

engineers-clock

(It actually says ‘Sheldon Cooper’s clock’. And he was a… what? Hint: not engineer. Remember the engineer in that show?) I mean, it’s finally a bunch of frivolity, dudes. Settle down, grow up. And relax, science students get it. At least there’s no reason to doubt that a significantly different (and necessarily lower) fraction of science students get it as compared to engineering students.

So who makes this stuff, anyway? To hell with whoever makes them. The creator is inconsequential. Why, my engineer friends (some, not all of them), do you suppose that they consist an argument for your intellectual superiority, and gladly hand it around under that label? Why do you circulate a photo of the German water bridge with a ‘this is what engineers do’ tag? You are not in Germany. You are in India. This is not what you do. You know very well what engineers do in India and what we have achieved till now. Not much, frankly. I’m not condemning having achieved next to nothing. Indian science lately hasn’t achieved much either. My point is, I don’t see ‘superior scientist’ labels slapped on half-baked nerd jokes and circulated on social networks. Why do you think is that?

15 thoughts on “Engineer Jokes”

  3. Ankita

    I completely agree with this issue… though I too am an engineering student, but I guess I’m pretty clear about my priorities and circulating these jokes, is surely not one of them.. I appreciate it Abhranil, that you have spoken against it.

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  4. Idontknow

    Well, I share them at times because I just find them funny. I don’t see these ‘jokes’ depicting any reality or implying any intellectual superiority. They are like the ‘sardar’ jokes. They are just meant to make people laugh and nothing else at all!

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  5. Shonkho, I don’t understand why you prefaced this post with apologies (on my blog). You’ve not been condescending or catty or mean — or any of the things you thought you might have been. The only sentiment this post conveys is a sense of irritation, like, “Come on, people. Flip the switch on your brain and think before you take that smug, self-congratulatory leap”. I’d say this is sound, sound advice.

    Also, I wonder if you picked these particular ‘jokes’ on purpose. The first is transparently clear to anyone who cleared Class 9 in any board-certified school. I other words, teenagers with no degrees to their name know this stuff, so it just might have been the wrong example to pick for showing off one’s intellectual acumen. Now, if the poster had said, “Could you have come up with this solution yourself?”, I would probably have conceded immediately. Mathematical wit is not my forte.

    The clock is considerably cooler, I must admit. I had to look up Sheldon Cooper because I don’t watch TV, and well, if it’s part of a show, then guess who probably came up with it? That’s right. The scriptwriters. And again, one doesn’t need to be a college-level tech. or science student to ‘get’ this. One rational glance tells you what the unfamiliar numbers/sylbols/function are supposed to represent, and Google will tell you the rest. And even us, humanities/social science types don’t need help with 1100 to the base 2, tan (45), sq. root 4, the equation for 5 o’clock, and the expressions for 6 o’clock, 8 o’clock and 9 o’clock.

    So yes, did you deliberately pick the more easily accessible ‘jokes’? To undermine these people’s delusion of superior intellectual capablities? I’m curious 🙂

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    1. No I didn’t. But there weren’t any jokes which were intellectually challenging. There were, however, some which were terribly arrogant. In fact I couldn’t find those when I needed them for this post. They would have been a better example of the kind of attitude I find irritating. But facebook has no search feature for posts, and google is not allowed in to facebook. So I basically I took whatever I could get my hands on.

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  7. Vivek Karmarkar

    Actually whoever posted it implies something correct. PAPA=MAMA is a statement which is true in the context dat both are parents..in technical terms its a result which is specific to a particular frame of reference(context) and the result is squared because dats an easy form to recognize….and since the claim is made “Engineers Rockz!!!” the engineers are basically very keen to show dat even though they cant solve physics problems they write physics equations which make sense to engineers and which is bullshit according to the physicist who actually understands physics…so they r just trying to be cool because they r not cool…. 🙂

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  9. Anmol

    wow…..a group of frustrated guys n girls who can’t handle a bunch of jokes….(instead see arrogance in dem) , y r u guyz so insecure about ur intellect??
    ….. discuss smethin useful , dat might actually help. All tose jokes may b pure bullshit but they dont harm nyone…i see no point in getting irritated over all dis…….

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    2. You DO realize that you’re actually proving Abhra’s point, right? If you read that post and swallowed it verbatim, I think it’s abundantly clear you missed its point. :-/

      By the way, your reasoning about jokes being pure bullshit and not being harmful, and that legitimizing them would make any logician faint. Just saying. 😐

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