The Engineering Pecking Order

Engineering ethics? I hardly knew her! 🚀 Nothing quite like watching fresh-faced engineering graduates suddenly develop amnesia about their "I want to save the world" senior thesis when Lockheed Martin waves that six-figure salary and premium healthcare benefits. Turns out principles have a surprisingly exact dollar value! The internal monologue goes from "sustainable future for humanity" to "how many missiles can I optimize per quarter?" faster than you can say "military-industrial complex." It's the STEM version of selling your soul, except instead of meeting the devil at a crossroads, you're signing paperwork in a corporate office with free snacks!

The classic bait-and-switch of engineering education. First semester: "Look at these cool bridges and rockets!" Eighth semester: calculating stress tensors at 3 AM while questioning your life choices. ME2 (Mechanical Engineering 2) is where dreams of building Iron Man suits go to die, replaced by the harsh reality of differential equations that refuse to balance. The poetic lament is simply *chef's kiss* - engineering student creativity peaks inversely with their will to continue.

Parents: "Let's teach our kid about money!" Kid: *immediately uses money to buy physics degree* Congratulations Billy, you've mastered the art of financial decisions that guarantee you'll understand everything about the universe except how to pay rent. Classic physics major move - learning how to calculate the trajectory of a falling object but completely missing the trajectory of your bank account. Don't worry though, that's why engineering exists - it's where physicists go when they finally want to afford groceries!

The career pivot from defense to healthcare in one perfect image. Yesterday you were designing weapons systems, today you're comforting crying children. Talk about transferable skills! Your resume reads "Missile Guidance Expert" but your new job requires emotional intelligence and a heart that wasn't previously in the job description. The military-industrial complex prepared you for everything except genuine human connection. The thousand-yard stare in that photo says it all—remembering when the only thing you had to comfort was the targeting algorithm.

Engineers see a simple mechanical part. Machinists and QA see a nightmare of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing symbols that might as well be ancient hieroglyphics. Nothing says "I hate you" quite like an engineer adding a flatness tolerance of 0.013mm to a surface that will never touch anything. The real engineering challenge is finding a machinist who won't plot your murder after seeing those GD&T callouts.

The perfect electrical rejection. In this masterpiece of physics humor, non-conductive materials are literally rejecting the advances of free electrons. The title "Mho=0" refers to conductance (measured in mhos, the inverse of resistance) being zero - which is precisely what happens in insulators. Those poor electrons keep trying to flow, but insulators just won't let them pass. It's basically the physics equivalent of being left on read.