The One with the Engineer

Monday, September 18, 2006 <-- from xy's blog
Joke of the Day...Engineers! *tsk tsk tsk*
DUring tutorial for History of military thoughts today, my lecturer from Australia told a very funny joke to demonstrate the point on how engineers are not the smartest people around. Well at least I thought it were hilarious. My kind of joke, and sorry to those engineers out there reading this...I'm not apologetic. Heeh

When a lecturer says "Good Morning" to a class from Arts, the students will reply by nodding their head.
When a lecturer says "Good Morning" to a class from Science, the students will echo back the same words.
When a lecturer says "Good Morning" to a class from Engineering....they'll write it down.
posted by Cloud @ 9:07 PM

An engineer replied to it:

Anonymous said...
In the working world,
When someone says good morning to an engineer, the engineer nods his head in reply.

When someone says good morning to a business grad, the business grad nods his head in reply.

When someone says good morning to an arts grad, the arts grad replies to the engineern, "Good morning boss, coffee with milk?"

10:17 PM

Cloud said...
That is only if the engineer thinks small...(which further demonstrates my initial point that they are)

When a history graduate walks into a class his/her students will say "Good morning teacher!"

hurhurhur... ;p

8:31 AM

우찌유 said...
I'm sorry 'anonymous', but you just don't make sense. If you're trying to say that engineers are 'higher up' than arts grads, your joke just isn't phrased correctly. (which illustrates the point that engineers just don't know how to work with language. they copy but they dunno how to apply. hurhurhur) I'm not against a good joke. but a bad joke. no no no no.

what your joke says is that is someone says good morning to an engineer or a businessman, they will only nod their heads in reply. but if someone says good morning to an arts grad, he will reply TO THE ENGINEER with 'good morning boss, coffee with milk?'

that's wrong in so many ways.

when you say the engineer and businessman nod their heads in reply, it is implied that they're busy. or they just couldn't care less. that's fine.

but whenever someone says good morning to an arts grad, there are 4 implications. (i) the arts grad doesn't reply to the someone and instead finds an engineer to reply to (ii) only engineers are polite enough to greet people good morning --> this also implies they're too free to go around greeting people, and there is also the conflicting view that if engineers are nice enough to greet people, why are they so mean to each other and only nod their heads in reply? (iii) that arts grads are the only nice people that reply to greetings or (iv) that the arts grad is the employee of the engineer (I guess this is what you are trying to mean). WTF is an 'engineern' anyway?

As you can see, due to the various obvious differences in implications from the statement, your punchline is fundamentally flawed. Incoherent and shows just how much of an 'engineern' you are. Wahoo! (Now that's a joke!)

If you're looking at stereotyping the jobs of an arts graduate, you might want to understand the situation first. Usually arts graduates aren't associated with working under engineers per se. So your observation is unfortunately wrong. Perhaps you might want to try illustrating the arts grad as working in the teaching line after graduation. Afterall that's where many of them go to.

No arts grad will actually work under an engineer in a plant or construction industries. It's not within their scope. Perhaps you might want to come up with a joke involving an arts grad studying all the way to get his/her degree only to be assigned to primary school and having to clean her student's backside coz he/she just shat in class. That'll be an implication of doing all the studying just to land in a position of doing what he/she didn't need all that education for. To clean up children's shit.

If you do wanna change 'someone' to 'engineer' in the joke, it'll come off like this:

When an engineer says good morning to another engineer, the other engineer nods his head in reply
--> implication, either busy or rude. that's fine.

When an engineer says good morning to a businessman, the businessman nods his head in reply
--> implication, either busy, or the engineer very irritating he don't want to talk to him.

Then you can say:
When an engineer says good morning to an arts grad, the arts grad replies: Good morning boss, coffee with milk?
--> only then can you draw the inference that he's an employee.

Might I add a line to the joke in an attempt to make it funny. Instead of 'someone' I'll be 'specific' here.

When an engineer says good morning to a lawyer, the lawyer (probably from WongP) replies to the engineer, "How? Got new case for me ah?"

(PS: You might want to know that many of the IMF delegates are arts grads. Whilst... sad to say the engineers were lacking at the meetings. I wonder why. Busy dreaming about ordering arts grads around I suppose)

9:01 AM

You sad sad little engineern.

There is also the stereotype that engineers in nus are desperate. Why?. Here's an extract from someone's blog. I randomly googled it so no offence if it's yours:

What's the course like?

Enjoyable. For one thing, u are gonna have lots of female classmates. That's a enviable position compared to other eng discipline.

KNN. come to study or pao char bo. No wonder struggling with studies la, got time to eavesdrop on girls summore:

I overheard a conversation between these two undergrads. One was complaining regarding the amount of test she has. The other was complaining regarding the projects due. I was quite curious and listened on. Horrors of horror, one had only 2 mid term tests and the other had 2 projects due. Sigh, I share my plight together with the other hundred over engine undergrads, mugging away in the day & night, burning the “mid-night oil”. 5 mid term papers my friend! Plus one essay assignment. And best of all, the test was freaking difficult.

Sigh. Gone were the slack-laid-back days in the Police Force. Time to get back to reality.

---

If they had spent less time ogling at arts girls and more time studying, they might probably be doing pretty well... You wanna slack, go back police force la. soon i shall blog about my visit to the police station. no i wasn't caught. that was last time. hurhurhur. this time my turn to lodge report... and boy was the office 'helpful'... knn...