I wish I had the brain to be an engineer. Not only because engineers seem to get paid a lot more than journalists – and they have a lot more job opportunities – but because I’m a girl. As far as I can tell, there are about five girl engineers in the world, so I assume they’re a hot commodity on the job market.
Although, if my engineering skills blew chunks, future employers would probably thrill at my femininity for two seconds, and then run away from me like a dude whose chick is hinting, “If you like it, just put a ring on it.”
But if I had their smarts, engineers would probably be delighted that my strange girlish ways and I want to join their ranks.
I realize natural talent isn’t the only way I could become an engineer. I could switch my major and study like there’s no tomorrow. But as I’m clearly trying to take the easy way out here, I’d appreciate if you’d shut your trap.
Anyway, I’m not just into this whole engineering-brain-getting-thing for the money and job opportunities. With it, I would have dominated the Thanksgiving table conversation with my brother and my brother-in-law, who were excluding everyone else by talking in code.
I suppose it’s not code to them; just the rest of us who don’t understand parts of cars and things. When I look under the hood of the car I just see a bunch of greasy-looking junk.
How mechanics go about identifying what the junk is, figuring out what is wrong with it and mending it is beyond me. But at least I understand the bare minimum of what mechanics do. I still have no idea what engineers do.
Apparently, it’s something to do with designing things. I suppose my husky, ginger, mechanical engineering brother, Gerard, sits at his desk, in front of his computer screen, muttering and pondering things. And, snorting – seriously, dude’s got some kind of never-ending allergy problem.
After a couple minutes spent pondering, muttering and snorting, a cartoon light bulb appears above his head and ideas for new, fabulous, yet-unheard-of machinery flow out of the light bulb into his brain, like lava from Vesuvius in its heyday. Then, with a flurry, he takes to his computer to record these brilliant plans in some kind of graph-y computer program. See, I told you I had no idea what engineers do.
I’m usually much better at imagining careers where I have no skill. Seriously, you can’t imagine the time I’ve wasted daydreaming up plans like moving to Hawaii and becoming a professional surfer, or using my nonexistent fluency in several foreign languages and general suaveness to be a spy.
And, while I can’t promise you that any of my pipe dreams will come true, there’s one plan I’ll definitely carry out. I’ll never show this column to any potential future employers.
