The McMaster-Carr Kingdom

The frustration on Buzz Lightyear's face perfectly captures that moment when physics students realize their beautiful theoretical models crash into reality. For years, we solve problems assuming "negligible air resistance" to make the math work. Then real-world aerodynamics shows up uninvited to the calculation party and ruins everything! Suddenly those elegant parabolic trajectories become complex differential equations, and your spacecraft doesn't quite make it to infinity and beyond. The academic betrayal is real - no one warned us the atmosphere would be such a drag!

The ultimate taboo questions chart! Women hide their age, men hide their salary, but chemical engineers? They break into cold sweats when asked about fugacity. For the uninitiated, fugacity is that nightmare thermodynamic property in physical chemistry that makes students question their life choices. It's like pressure... but with extra mathematical torture sprinkled on top. Chemistry students worldwide have collective PTSD from trying to calculate it during exams while their professors smiled sadistically in the corner.

The gender ratio in engineering classes is so skewed that the little green aliens from Toy Story have a more balanced perspective. Those poor STEM guys act like they've spotted a cryptid whenever estrogen enters the room. The sad part? This meme is still accurate despite decades of efforts to balance engineering demographics. Maybe if we treated women in engineering with the same enthusiasm as we treat free pizza at department seminars, we'd actually make some progress.

Ever see those carefully designed holes in structural beams? They're not just for decoration! The structural engineer spent FOUR WHOLE DAYS designing those perfect penetrations for pipes and wires to pass through. Then the building services engineer comes along and says "Nah, I'll just route this pipe AROUND the beam instead!" The photo shows the pipe completely missing the available hole, running alongside the beam instead. It's like watching someone use a hammer to screw in a lightbulb when there's a perfectly good screwdriver RIGHT THERE! This is why structural engineers develop eye twitches by age 40. Construction coordination fails are the engineering equivalent of stepping on a Lego barefoot!

Every engineer's nightmare: opening a CAD file modeled in millimeters when your software defaults to inches. Suddenly your precision-crafted component is now the size of a small building! That 5mm screw? Congratulations, it's now a 5-inch monster bolt that could secure the Golden Gate Bridge. The horror on that face is the universal expression of "I just wanted to check one dimension and now my computer is rendering the Death Star." Engineers in the wild can be identified by their muttering about "unit conversion disasters" and reflexively checking the measurement system before opening any file.

The eternal struggle of engineering students captured in one image. Imperial units have students calmly solving a straightforward problem, while metric calculations drive them to existential despair and acrobatics. What's truly hilarious is that metric is objectively simpler—it's just that American education has conditioned students to fear SI units like they're some kind of dark magic. The contrast between the composed imperial solvers and the metric users hanging themselves with unit conversion anxiety is painfully relatable to anyone who's had to switch between systems mid-exam. The real punchline? Most scientific fields exclusively use metric, so these imperial-loving students are just postponing their inevitable breakdown. Nothing says "welcome to engineering" like sobbing over Pascal conversions at 3 AM.