The hardware engineer went first. "I would like to spend the rest of my life living in a huge house in St. Thomas with no money worries." The genie granted him his wish and sent him on off to St. Thomas.

The software engineer went next. "I would like to spend the rest of my life living on a huge yacht cruising the Mediterranean with no money worries." The genie granted him his wish and sent him off to the Mediterranean.

Last, but not least, it was the project manager's turn. "And what would your wish be?" asked the genie.

"I want them both back after lunch" replied the project manager.

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were all given a red rubber ball and told to find the volume.
The mathematician carefully measured the diameter and evaluated a triple integral.
The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball in the water, and measured the total displacement.
The engineer looked up the model and serial numbers in his red-rubber-ball table.

What's the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?
Mechanical engineers build weapons.
Civil engineers build targets.

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

Scientists at NASA have developed a gun built specifically to launch dead chickens at the windshields of airliners, military jets and the space shuttle, all traveling at maximum velocity. The idea is to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions with airborne fowl to test the strength of the windshields.

British engineers heard about the gun and were eager to test it on the windshields of their new high speed trains. Arrangements were made, and when the gun was fired, the engineers stood shocked as the chicken hurtled out of the barrel, crashed into the shatterproof shield, smashed it to smithereens, crashed through the control console, snapped the engineer's backrest in two and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin.

Horrified Britons sent NASA the disastrous results of the experiment, along with the designs of the windshield, and begged the U.S. scientists for suggestions. NASA's response was just one sentence, "THAW THE CHICKEN!"

An astronaut in space was asked by a reporter, "How do you feel?"
"How would you feel," the astronout replied, "if you were stuck here, on top of 20,000 parts each one supplied by the lowest bidder?"

During the heat of the space race in the 1960's, NASA decided it needed a ball point pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules.

After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of $1 million. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth.

The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.

If it wasn't for Thomas Alva Edison, we'd all be watching TV to the light of a candle.

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain.

An engineer, a mathematician and an arts graduate were given the task of finding the height of a church steeple (the first to get the correct solution wins a $1000).

The engineer tried to remember things about differential pressures, but resorted to climbing the steeple and lowering a string on a plumb bob until it touched the ground and then climbed down and measured the length of the string.

The Mathematician layed out a reference line, measured the angle to the top of the steeple from both ends and worked out the height by trigonometry.

However, the arts graduate won the prize. He bought the vicar a beer in the local pub and he told him how high the church steeple was.

The great mathematician John Von Neumann was consulted by a group who was building a rocket ship to send into outer space. When he saw the incomplete structure, he asked, "Where did you get the plans for this ship?"
He was told, "We have our own staff of engineers."
He disdainfully replied: "Engineers! Why, I have complete sewn up the whole mathematical theory of rocketry. See my paper of 1952."

Well, the group consulted the 1952 paper, completely scrapped their 10 million dollar structure, and rebuilt the rocket exactly according to Von Neumann's plans. The minute they launched it, the entire structure blew up. They angrily called Von Neumann back and said: "We followed your instructions to the letter. Yet when we started it, it blew up! Why?"
Von Neumann replied, "Ah, yes; that is technically known as the blow-up problem - I treated that in my paper of 1954."

An engineering student is walking along when a fellow student arrives on a new bicycle. Impressed, he asks, "Where did you got this beautiful bicycle?"

"Well," the second engineering student says, "A couple of days ago I was just walking along when this georgeous blonde pulls up, hops off the bike, rips off all her clothes, and says 'take what you want'."

The other engineering student nods and says "Good choice. The clothes probably wouldn't have fit."

Three freshman engineering students were sitting around talking between classes, when one brought up the question of who designed the human body.

One of the students insisted that the human body must have been designed by an electrical engineer because of the perfection of the nerves and synapses.

Another disagreed, and exclaimed that it had to have been a mechanical engineer who designed the human body. The system of levers and pullies is ingenious.

"No," the third student said "your both wrong. The human body was designed by an architect. Who else but an architect would have put a toxic waste line through a recreation area?"

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Top Ten Things Engineering School didn't Teach You

1. There are at least 10 types of capacitors.
   
2. Theory tells you how a circuit works, not why it does not work.
   
3. Not everything works according to the specs in the databook.
   
4. Anything practical you learn will be obsolete before you use it, except the complex math, which you will never use.
   
5. Engineering is like having an 8 a.m. class and a late afternoon lab every day for the rest of your life.
   
6. Overtime pay? What overtime pay?
   
7. Managers , not engineers, rule the world.
   
8. Always try to fix the hardware with software.
   
9. If you like junk food, caffeine and all-nighters, go into software.
   
10. Dilbert is not a comic strip, it's a documentary.
    

A start-up engineer is someone who solves a problem you didn't know you had, in a way you don't understand.

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