WASHINGTON, D. C. – The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) filed a lawsuit in U. S. federal court in Washington, D. C. seeking exclusive rights to use the word “engineer” in any and all written and oral communications. Union president Lionel X. Crossing said, “For too long we have let the world take a free ride on our property. The very word ‘engineer’ means someone who operates an engine, i.e., a locomotive. The word has illegally been appropriated by all those robotic bozos who sit around and draw pictures and calculate numbers using slide rules and abacuses.”
“The worst are the so-called petroleum engineers. The closest they ever come to an engine is whatever is powering that gizmo they call a pumpjack. In fact, they depend in large part on us trainmen, trainwomen, and train2SLGBTQQIA+ to haul their stinky oil to wherever it needs to go. They ought to be called contrivers or devisers or at best technicians. The whole process will be easier once we convince or bribe the dictionary publishers to change the definition of engineer to show it exclusively applies to trains.”
As you may expect, the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and other such organizations all had hissy fits and vowed to fight the lawsuit with every available resource. Smelling blood in the water, the American Bar Association (ABA) is going on a feeding frenzy. Association president Waldorf T. Flywheel commented, “This is going to consume years in the courts, cost millions of dollars, take thousands of lives, and we love it!”
Off the record, Mr. Crossing admitted that the real reason for the lawsuit is to collect royalties from anyone who wants to use the word “engineer.” Any regular reader of 2P News knows that we don’t do off-the-record interviews. If we can screw with somebody, we will.
Meanwhile, the geologists, geophysicists and landmen are all laughing their asses off.
