The Three Stages Of Engineering Grief

SpaceX engineers clearly took inspiration from sushi night. Left: picking up a California roll with chopsticks. Right: SpaceX's mechanical chopsticks catching a 230-foot rocket booster mid-air. Both require precision, but only one costs $3 billion and has Elon tweeting about it. The engineering team must've been really hungry during that design meeting.

The tech industry hierarchy in one perfect metaphor! Product managers and developers bask in the glory of a successful launch while DevOps engineers desperately hang on for dear life, drowning in deployment issues, monitoring alerts, and broken CI/CD pipelines. Nothing says "thanks for your service" like being the invisible foundation holding everything together while the cool kids take the spotlight. The real MVP is always the person frantically typing commands at 3 AM when the production server catches fire!

The eternal struggle of STEM students captured in perfect meme format! On the left, we have the skeletal, barely-alive business major bragging about their 3.87 GPA while their soul has clearly left their body. Meanwhile, the engineering student with their measly 2.6 GPA looks like an absolute chad—fully bearded, well-adjusted, and somehow thriving despite being crushed by differential equations and thermodynamics at 2AM. The engineering curriculum is basically academic hazing with equations. Those partial derivatives and material stress calculations don't care about your sleep schedule or social life. The business major is studying "supply and demand" while engineers are calculating how many tears per hour they can produce before dehydration sets in.

The mathematical hunger games have claimed another victim! Dad's not winning—he's being consumed by the computational apocalypse. Surrounded by MATLAB, Wolfram, LaTeX, Desmos, Matcad, and Sublime Text 3, he's descended into the ninth circle of numerical hell that every engineer and scientist knows too well. That moment when your code breaks, your equations mock you, and your will to live is inversely proportional to your debugging time. The child's innocent "Dad are u winning?" is the universe's cruelest joke. No child, Dad isn't winning. Dad is discovering why math was invented by ancient civilizations as a sophisticated form of torture.

Behold! The classic trolley problem has mutated into the introvert's worst nightmare! Sure, you could save those poor souls on the track by flipping a switch, but at what cost? SOCIAL INTERACTION! For many engineers, calculating the trajectory of a runaway trolley is child's play compared to the sheer terror of making eye contact with another human being. The laws of physics are predictable; human conversation is quantum chaos! This is why so many of us became engineers in the first place—to avoid these exact scenarios! *nervously adjusts safety goggles*

Two types of physicists in their natural habitat! On one side, we've got the pragmatic engineer with their trusty lookup tables going "brrrrr" like a money printer. On the other, the theoretical purist insisting on deriving EVERYTHING from first principles like some mathematical masochist. The pencil tip perfectly represents that theoretical physicist's ego—sharp, precise, and ready to poke holes in your approximations. Meanwhile, the lookup table folks are just trying to get stuff done before the grant money runs out!