It Was Always Ground

The ultimate scientific rivalry exposed! Engineers sitting there with their functioning bridges and actual working devices while physicists mock their "close enough" calculations. Meanwhile, those same physicists are busy assuming spherical cows in a vacuum and neglecting air resistance on literally everything. The irony is delicious - like watching someone in a glass laboratory throw stones. Engineers build the real world with approximations that work, while physicists create perfect theories that only function in imaginary universes. Talk about the pot calling the kettle "approximately black"!

Engineers proudly declaring they don't know basic math while simultaneously denying it has anything to do with their profession is peak engineering culture. The beautiful contradiction of someone presenting a slide that says "Just because we are engineers doesn't mean we know basic math" followed by the panicked clarification "I mean, we don't, but not because we're engineers!" is exactly why calculators were invented. Engineers will design a nuclear reactor but panic when asked to divide by hand. They're not bad at math because they're engineers—they're engineers because they're clever enough to find ways around doing math!

Engineers and physicists living in completely different realities! The engineer wants to simplify calculations by rounding gravity to 10m/s² (actual value ~9.8) and π to 3.14 (actual value 3.14159...), and the physicist is having an existential crisis. To a physicist, those constants are SACRED TEXTS! It's like suggesting we round the speed of light to "about 300 million m/s, give or take." The horror! The blasphemy! Next thing you know, someone will suggest Planck's constant is "roughly zero" and the physicist will need therapy.

Someone innocently asks for tear-jerking book recommendations, and an engineering student responds with "Engineering Mechanics: Statics (14th Edition)" by Russell C. Hibbeler. Nothing says emotional trauma quite like calculating the equilibrium of rigid bodies at 3 AM while questioning your life choices. That textbook doesn't just teach you about force vectors—it teaches you about the crushing weight of regret. Every engineering student knows that statics isn't just a subject; it's an existential crisis bound in hardcover.

Rest? What is this "rest" you speak of? Software engineers during lockdown were like electrons in an excited state—they just couldn't relax to a lower energy level! While everyone else was baking sourdough, these code-crunching creatures were hunched over laptops, battling deadlines that mysteriously multiplied faster than bacteria in a petri dish. The only difference between pre-lockdown and lockdown for them? The commute from bed to desk got shorter by approximately 37 seconds. Their caffeine consumption, however, increased by 254%—I've done the calculations, and the math checks out!

The engineer's solution to a non-right triangle? Just scribble out that pesky non-90° angle and draw in a perfect right angle! Who needs mathematical integrity when you can just redraw reality? This is basically the engineering equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?" but for geometry. Pure engineering pragmatism at its finest—if the math doesn't fit your needs, just modify the universe until it does!