That's The Real Civil War

The painful metamorphosis of an engineer into a project manager is captured perfectly here! What starts as a hopeful engineer wanting to do actual technical work gradually transforms into the full clown regalia of management responsibilities. The progression from "maybe if I appease management" to "yeah I'll make sure their deliverables are in on time" illustrates the classic Peter Principle in action—where technical wizards get promoted until they're just scheduling meetings and updating spreadsheets instead of solving real problems. Every engineer's worst nightmare is becoming the very bureaucracy they once complained about. The rainbow wig is the final boss of career development!

For sale: homemade Dyson Sphere. Just a small prototype with three solar panels, but it's honest work. Could potentially harness the entire energy output of the sun if you, you know, add a few trillion more panels and position them around our star. Currently powers half a toaster. $4.5 quadrillion firm. No financing available. Serious Type II civilizations only.

Fractional distillation of petroleum: the world's most dangerous buffet menu. "Yes, I'll have the petrol at 70°, sounds refreshing." Meanwhile, only psychopaths would order the asphalt at the bottom. The petroleum industry's version of "the floor is lava" gets more literal the further down you go. Just remember - if your dinner requires a fractioning column to prepare, perhaps reconsider your dietary choices.

Engineers looking at π and e: "Three. Take it or leave it." 🤣 The eternal battle between mathematical precision and practical application! While mathematicians are busy calculating digits to the trillionth place, engineers are over here like "yeah, we're just gonna round that bad boy down to 3." Who needs those extra 0.14159... digits anyway? Not someone trying to build a bridge before lunch!

The engineering pipeline in three stages of enlightenment! First we have the rookie engineer sobbing because "CAD says they fit" but reality demands tolerances. Then there's the bell curve showing the statistical distribution of IQ scores with most people clustered in the middle (68% between 85-115). Finally, the veterans at both extremes of the curve who just shrug and say "that looks good enough" – because they've learned the beautiful truth about engineering: sometimes precision matters, and sometimes you just need the damn thing to work. The middle part of the curve is still calculating while the extremes are already shipping products!

Classic hypocrisy in STEM fields. We mock engineers for using π = 3 while simultaneously treating spherical cows as legitimate scientific models. Nothing says "I'm a serious physicist" like reducing complex biological organisms to perfect yellow spheres that say "mooooo." Next time you're simplifying a problem, remember you're just one "assume a spherical cow" away from being exactly what you ridicule.