A doctor, a lawyer, and an engineer are discussing whether it’s better to have a wife or to have a girlfriend.
The doctor says it’s better to have a wife, because of sexual monogamy and STDs and yada yada yada.
The lawyer says no, it’s better to have a girlfriend. No marriage means no divorce means no messy legal problems.
The engineer says, to their surprise, that it’s best to have both! What?! they ask. “Sure,” he says. “You tell your wife you’re with your girlfriend, you tell your girlfriend you’re with your wife, then you go to the office and get some work done.”
Some engineers and a layman are given a tape measure and are asked to see how tall a pole is. The engineers spend several hours trying to climb on each other’s shoulders or rig a device to reach the top of the pole, but to no avail. Finally, the layman pulls the pull out of the ground and measures it.
“Pfft,” say the engineers. "They asked for height, not length!
The engineer and the scientist are in a contest. They’re put at one side of a room, and on the other side of the room is a nekkid attractive person of the opposite sex.
The rule of the game is to walk half-way across the room, then half-way of the remaining distance, and so on.
The scientist immediately quits, saying that there’s no way he’ll actually get all the way across the room. The engineer starts right in. “I don’t care if I get all the way there - I just want to get close enough for practical purposes.”
So four engineers are driving in a car, when all of a sudden, the car comes to a stop. The mechanical engineer says “I recognize that sound; it’s a jammed cylinder”. The chemical engineer says “No, no, it’s obviously a problem with the fuel… Probably the wrong octane”. The electrical engineer says “Isn’t it obvious that the spark plugs are misfiring?”. The computer engineer says “Why don’t we all just get out of the car, and get back in?”.
I have others, but they’re mostly “A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer”, and usually, the mathematician gets the punchline, so I’ll skip those.
Two groups of engineers are travelling by train to a conference. Everyone in the first group buys a ticket, only one person in the second group does. The first group says to the second, “The conductor is coming. What are you going to do?”
Just as the conductor reaches their car, the second group all go into one of the two bathrooms in the car, and the “Occupied” light comes on. When the conductor says “Tickets Please” one yells out “I’m in here” and pushes the ticket out the door and the conductor punches it, and passes it back in.
The first group sees this and decide to use the same trick on the way home. They buy one ticket among them, but this time the second group doesn’t buy a single ticket. “What are you doing?” the first group asks, “Are you nuts?”
As the conductor approaches the car each group enters one of the bathrooms in the car. But as the first group closes their door, one member of the second group pops out of their bathroom, knocks on the first’s door and says “Tickets Please.”
An engineer, a biologist, and a mathematician are watching a room. They see two people enter. After a while, three people leave. The engineer says “There must be another entrance.” The biologist thinks about that and says “No, they must be reproducing.” The mathematician says “Well, it doesn’t really matter; what we need is for one more person to go in, and then the room will be empty again.”
I know a guy who did that. Retired from a huge factory where he’d been warehousing and general “moving stuff around” manager, being replaced by several young bucks with college degrees, an allergy to dirty hands and no taste for listening to degree-less old fellas.
Whenever the huge factory had a problem with stocking plans, timetables for warehousing, etc, they’d call him in as a consultant. He’d go in, fix things, offer to explain it to his replacement(s), be politely refused, get back on his Harley and hop home.
And when the huge factory got a new warehouse management software - they hired him to be the implementor! Not one of the new guys, him. So of course, he’s still the only one who knows all the little details… :smack:
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No big machines in this one.
A mathematician, a physicist, an engineer and a chemist (or chemeng) have to build a bridge.
The mathematician comes up with all these beautiful formulas describing the ideal bridge.
The physicist uses them to prepare a huge, multi-colored diagram of all the forces involved.
The engineer uses the drawing as a dartboard while doing things using “thiswide” as a measurement unit.
A farmer hired a zoologist, a mathematician, and an engineer to build a fence. He wanted to enclose 100 sheep with the shortest length of fence possible.
The zoologist said that each sheep needed 10 ft[sup]2[/sup] of area, so he would have to enclose 1000 ft[sup]2[/sup].
The mathematician said that a circle has the greatest ratio of area/perimeter, so the farmer would need 320 feet of fence.
All the while the engineer was carefully building a small fence around himself. When he finished, he looked at the farmer and said, " I define myself on the outside."
I’ve also seen a version of this where the balloonist says, “You must be a Microsoft employee.”
This one might be taken wrong, but I’m posting it anyway:
Q) What’s the difference between a civil engineer and a mechanical engineer?
A) Civil engineers build targets, mechanical engineers build bombs.
Ah, but usually it’s the engineer that comes up with the real-world solution of using a circle, while the mathematician has the technically correct but impractical solution.
I liked Dilbert’s take on it. Optimist, half full, pessimist, half empty, as usual. And the engineer, Dilbert: “Good thing I put half my water in a redundant glass.”
A geneticist, an aerodynamicist, and an aerosol scientist are asked by the governor of Kentucky to develop a faster racehorse. The geneticist says “We have to breed a more muscular horse”. The aerodynamicist says “No, we need a horse that has less resistance to air”. the aerosol scientist says “That’s right! To begin with, let’s suppose the horse is a sphere…”
[In aerosol science, which is the study of particles suspended in air, it is very common to assume for the purposes of moving through air that the particles are spherical.]
