Back in February, 2014, 2P News published an article called 5 things everybody should know about engineers, which appeared to really strike a chord with readers because it was a resounding success with over 11 visitors reading it. It is over ten years later, and we are now presenting to you part II, which will take us from points six through ten. Please enjoy and share this piece. Thank you.
Six
In every romantic relationship, engineers always bring a spreadsheet. No, not metaphorically—a literal Excel spreadsheet loaded up on a 10-year-old, 22lb, laptop with a 21″ screen, and over-sized leather shoulder bag. The XLSM file typically contains tabs labeled “Budget Projections,” “Gift Optimization,” and “Emotional Response ROI.” Engineers believe love, like any other system, needs quantifiable metrics, KPIs, and a periodic review process. And while this may not seem romantic to the untrained heart, the heart of an engineer races at a good and solid data set and insightful plots – the mere mention the word Tornado Plot to an engineer at a dinner date and guaranteed a half-chub, at minimum, will form under the table. After a recent survey, 93% of engineer relationships failed to meet Q1 romance projections, but, the engineers assured, “it’s only a temporary deviation from an R^2 of at least .90 on a two-order polynomial multi-variate, non-linear regression.”
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Seven
Engineers never let their guard down—even at weddings. Attending a ceremony, the average engineer has already calculated the optimal seating arrangement based on HVAC flow and noise reduction coefficients, balanced against proximity to the wedding cake. For their own weddings, many engineers insist on a CAD drawing of the venue, where the flower arrangements are meticulously plotted for airflow efficiency and optimal fragrance distribution. Engineers attending a wedding will often calculate the parabola of the flowers being tossed by the bride with nothing more than the initial velocity and an estimated release angle to within 1/2 of a degree. This way they can direct their girlfriends (even those that are air-filled or robotic) in a direction away from the landing point. What’s more is that vows are often given in terms of conditional statements: “If you love me, and if you agree to my conditional assumptions, then the limit of my love shall approach infinity with t (where t = time), with a margin of error ± 0.0001%.”
Eight
An engineer’s worst nightmare is actually not a failed project, but an IKEA assembly manual. Many engineers have lost hours, if not days, pouring over the peculiar nonsensical drawings of the infamous Swedish “manual,” which includes 16 unlabeled screws, three mysterious symbols, and a tool that resembles a cross between a hex key and a prison shank. Engineers have reportedly taken personal sabbaticals to reverse-engineer their own assembly instructions, leading to entire break rooms full of perfectly symmetrical but thoroughly unusable IKEA furniture.
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Nine
Engineers are known for obsessing over “efficiency” in all aspects of life, often to the detriment of basic social graces. The classic engineer date night involves precision timing: dinner (38 minutes), movie (1 hour, 53 minutes), and, if time allows, “extra romantic activities” slotted for precisely 12 minutes. Engineers enjoy life the way a Formula 1 pit crew enjoys racing—quick, optimized, and ideally involving an air compressor.
Ten
Finally, engineers really don’t understand why everyone else doesn’t do things in the most logical way possible. This includes household chores, basic driving directions, and, of course, putting together a grocery list, which has to be arranged by aisle. Every. Single. Time. Walking through the store, engineers will optimize their shopping patterns down to the meter, reducing backtracking and integrating a “least-cost path” algorithm. At a recent Engineers’ Grocery Convention held in San Francisco, California, participants were asked if they believed non-engineers had a “reasonable approach” to grocery shopping. Only one engineer responded “Yes,” but later admitted under duress that he was just trying to be polite.
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In conclusion, life with an engineer is a lot like living inside a physics experiment—controlled, precise, and often accidentally hilarious. But if there’s one thing you should know about engineers, it’s that they wouldn’t change a single equation of it. Even if they could.
