"I'm an Engineer & Stuff."
Jokes for Geeks
Island Engineer
A rather inhibited engineer finally splurged on a luxury cruise to the Caribbean. It was the "craziest" thing he had ever done in his life. Just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, a hurricane roared upon the huge ship, capsizing it like a child's toy. Somehow the engineer, desperately hanging on to a life preserver, managed to wash ashore on a secluded island.
Outside of beautiful scenery, a spring-fed pool, bananas and coconuts, there was little else. He lost all hope and for hours on end, sat under the same palm tree. One day, after several months had passed, a gorgeous woman in a small rowboat appeared.
"I'm from the other side of the island," she said. "Were you on the cruise ship, too?"
"Yes, I was, " he answered. "But where did you get that rowboat?"
"Well, I whittled the oars from gum tree branches, wove the reinforced gunwale from palm branches, and made the keel and stern from a Eucalyptus tree."
"But, what did you use for tools?" asked the man.
"There was a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed on the south side of the island. I discovered that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. Anyhow, that's how I got the tools. But, enough of that," she said. "Where have you been living all this time? I don't see any shelter."
"To be honest, I've just been sleeping on the beach," he said.
"Would you like to come to my place?" the woman asked. The engineer nodded dumbly.
She expertly rowed them around to her side of the island, and tied up the boat with a handsome strand of hand-woven hemp topped with a neat back splice. They walked up a winding stone walk she had laid and around a palm grove. There stood an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white.
"It's not much, but I call it home." Inside, she said, "Sit down please; would you like to have a drink?"
"No, thanks," said the man. "One more coconut juice and I'll throw up!"
"It won't be coconut juice," the woman replied. "I have a crude still out back, so we can have authentic Pina Coladas."
Trying to hide his amazement, the man accepted the drink, and they sat down on her couch to talk. After they had exchanged stories, the woman asked, "Tell me, have you always had a beard?"
"No," the man replied, "I was clean shaven all of my life until I ended up on this island."
"Well if you'd like to shave, there's a razor upstairs in the bathroom cabinet."
The man, no longer questioning anything, went upstairs to the bathroom and shaved with an intricate bone-and-shell device honed razor sharp. Next he showered -- not even attempting to fathom a guess as to how she managed to get warm water into the bathroom -- and went back downstairs. He couldn't help but admire the masterfully carved banister as he walked.
"You look great," said the woman. "I think I'll go up and slip into something more comfortable."
As she did, the man continued to sip his Pina Colada. After a short time, the woman, smelling faintly of gardenias, returned wearing a revealing gown fashioned out of pounded palm fronds.
"Tell me," she asked, "we've both been out here for a very long time with no companionship. You know what I mean. Haven't you been lonely, too... isn't there something that you really, really miss? Something that all men and women need? Something that would be really nice to have right now!"
"Yes there is!" the man replied, shucking off his shyness. "There is something I've wanted to do for so long. But on this island all alone, it was just... well, it was impossible."
"Well, it's not impossible any more," the woman said.
The man, practically panting in excitement, said breathlessly: "You mean... you actually figured out some way we can CHECK OUR E-MAIL HERE!!??!!"
Engineers & Choice
Two engineering students met while traveling across campus, one was on a bicycle. The one walking asked, "Where did you get such a great bike?" The second student engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business, just as you are now, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She dropped the bike to the ground, took off all of her clothes and dropped them on the ground, then she threw her hands up in the air saying, 'Take what you want.'" The first student engineer nodded approvingly, "Good choice; the clothes probably would not have fit anyway."
Engineers on Perception
To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
Some Standard
The US standard railroad gauge (the width between the two rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads. But why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge in England, then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing. Okay! So why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if anyone tried to use any other spacing, their wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. Then who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, don't fret. It may just be that you are exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war-horses.
Now the twist to the story..............
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site in Florida. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse's Ass!
The Y1K Bug
An Article from a London Newspaper (circa 999 A.D.)
Canterbury, England. A.D. 999.
An atmosphere close to panic prevails today throughout Europe as the millennial year 1000 approaches, bringing with it the so-called "Y1K Bug," a menace which, until recently, hardly anyone had ever heard of. Prophets of doom are warning that the entire fabric of Western Civilization, based as it now is upon monastic computations, could collapse, and that there is simply not enough time left to fix the problem.
Just how did this disaster-in-the-making ever arise? Why did no one anticipate that a change from a three-digit to a four-digit year would throw into total disarray all liturgical chants and all metrical verse in which any date is mentioned? Every formulaic hymn, prayer, ceremony and incantation dealing with dated events will have to be re-written to accommodate three extra syllables. All tabular chronologies with three-space year columns, maintained for generations by scribes using carefully hand-ruled lines on vellum sheets, will now have to be converted to four-space columns, at enormous cost. In the meantime, the validity of every official event, from baptisms to burials, from confirmations to coronations, may be called into question.
"We should have seen it coming," says Brother Cedric of St. Michael Abbey, here in Canterbury. "What worries me most is that THOUSAND contains the word THOU, which occurs in nearly all our prayers, and of course always refers to God. Using it now in the name of the year will seem almost blasphemous, and is bound to cause terrible confusion. Of course, we could always use Latin, but that might be even worse -- The Latin word for Thousand is Mille, which is the same as the Latin for mile. We won't know whether we are talking about time or distance!"
Stonemasons are already reported threatening to demand a proportional pay increase for having to carve an extra numeral in all dates on tombstones, cornerstones and monuments. Together with its inevitable ripple effects, this alone could plunge the hitherto-stable medieval economy into chaos.
A conference of clerics has been called at Winchester to discuss the entire issue, but doomsayers are convinced that the matter is now one of personal survival. Many families, in expectation of the worst, are stocking up on holy water and indulgences.
...So Few Good Engineers
Why there are so few good engineers...
It's the time of the French Revolution and they're doing their usual daily beheadings.
Today they're leading a priest, a prostitute and an engineer up to the guillotine. They ask the priest if he wants to be face up or face down when he meets his fate. The priest says that he would like to be face up as he goes to meet his maker.
They raise the blade of the guillotine, release it, it comes speeding down and suddenly stops just inches from his neck. Being devoutly religious, they take this as divine intervention and release the priest.
Next the prostitute comes to the guillotine. She also decides to die face up hoping that she will be as fortunate as the priest.
They raise the blade of the guillotine, release it, it comes speeding down and suddenly stops just inches from her neck. So they release the prostitute as well.
The engineer is next. He too decides to die facing up.
They raise the blade of the guillotine and suddenly the engineer cries out: "Hey, I see what your problem is!"
Why Engineers Don't Write Cookbooks
RECIPE FOR CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
Ingredients:
532.35 cm³ gluten
4.9 cm³ NaHCO3
4.9 cm³ refined halite
236 cm³ partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride
177.45 cm³ crystalline C12H22O11
177.45 cm³ unrefined C12H22O11
4.9 cm³ methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde
Two calcium carbonate-encapsulated avian albumen-coated protein ovoids
473.2 cm³ theobroma cacao
236 cm³ de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)
1. To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat transfer coefficient of about 100 Btu/F-ft²-hr, add ingredients one, two and three with constant agitation.
2. In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radial flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six, and seven until the mixture is homogenous.
3. To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three equal volumes of the homogenous mixture in reactor #1.
4. Additionally, add ingredient nine and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction.
5. Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture piecemeal on a 316SS sheet (300 x 600 mm).
6. Heat in a 460K oven for a period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnston's first order rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown.
7. Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25C heat-transfer table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.
Makes 5², ±2.
Chemistry Midterm Exam
(Following is an actual question from a Texas A&M class.)
Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
Support your answer with proof.
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant. One student however, wrote the following:
"First we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving.
I think we can safely assume that once a soul gets into Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.
As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions. Some state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions, and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to Hell.
With birth and death rates what they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
Now, we look at the rate of change in the volume of Hell, because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added.
This gives two possibilities:
(1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter, then the temperature and pressure will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
(2) Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the rate at which souls are entering, then the temperature will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Ms. Sheryl Atkinson during my freshman year, that "It will be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then (2) cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic."
The student got the only "A".
Editorial Note:
The above question was not really taken from a college exam, but it is still pretty darn funny! One of my personal "Top Favorites".
Be sure to also check out: "Interfaith Dialog"
An Engineer's Christmas - or: How does Santa DO that?
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.
This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second -- or 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them -- Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Merry Christmas!
Handy Engineering Conversions
Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter: Eskimo Pi
2000 pounds of Chinese soup: Won ton
1 millionth of a mouthwash: 1 microscope
Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement: 1 bananosecond
Weight an evangelist carries with God: 1 billigram
Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour: Knot-furlong
365.25 days of drinking low-calorie beer because it's less filling: 1 lite year
16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone: 1 Rod Serling
Half of a large intestine: 1 semicolon
1000 aches: 1 kilohurtz
Basic unit of laryngitis: 1 hoarsepower
Shortest distance between two jokes: A straight line.
453.6 graham crackers: 1 pound cake
1 million microphones: 1 megaphone
1 million bicycles: 2 megacycles
2000 mockingbirds: two kilomockingbirds (work on it....)
10 cards: 1 decacards
1 kilogram of falling figs: 1 Fig Newton
1000 cubic centimeters of wet socks: 1 literhosen
1 millionth of a fish: 1 microfiche
1 trillion pins: 1 terrapin
10 rations: 1 decoration
100 rations: 1 C-ration
2 monograms: 1 diagram
8 nickels: 2 paradigms
3 statute miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale University Hospital:
1 I.V. League
100 Senators: Not 1 decision
Hot Air
A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"
The man below says: "Yes you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."
"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.
"I am" replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well" says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but it's of no use to anyone."
The man below says, "You must work in management."
"I do" replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well", says the man, "You don't know where you are, or where you're going, but you expect me to be able to help; and you're in the same position as you were before we met, but now it's my fault."
GM vs. Microsoft
At a computer exposition (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles/gal."
General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement, "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?"
Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you would accept this too. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT". But, then you would have to buy more seats.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower. The oil, gas, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
And last but not the least....
The airbag system would say "are you sure?" before going off.
Millennia Year Application Software System
This memo is to announce the development of a new software system which will be Year 2000 compliant. This program is known as "Millennia Year Application Software System" (MYASS).
Next Monday there will be a meeting in which I will show MYASS to everyone. We will hold demonstrations throughout the month so that all employees will have an opportunity to get a good look at MYASS. We have not addressed networking aspects yet, so currently only one person at a time can use MYASS. This restriction will be removed after MYASS expands.
Some employees have begun using the program already. This morning I walked into a subordinate's office and was not surprised to find that she had her nose buried in MYASS. Some of the less technical people may be somewhat afraid of MYASS. Last week my secretary said to me, "I'm a little nervous, I never put anything in MYASS before." I helped her through the first time and afterward she admitted that it was relatively painless and she was actually looking forward to doing it again, and was even ready to kiss MYASS.
There have been concerns over the virus that was found in MYASS upon initial installation, but the virus has been eliminated and we were able to save MYASS. In the future, however, protection will be required prior to entering MYASS.
This database will encompass all information associated with the business. As you begin using the program, feel free to put anything you want in MYASS.
As MYASS grows larger, we envision a time when it will be commonplace for a supervisor to hand work to an employee and say, "Here, stick this in MYASS." It will be a great day when we need data quickly and our employees can respond, "Here it is, I just pulled it out of MYASS."
Girlfriend 2.0 Upgrade
I'm currently running the latest version of GirlFriend and I have been having some problems lately. I have been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 forever as my primary application, and all the Girlfriend releases I have tried have always conflicted with it. I hear that Drinking Buddies runs fine as long as Girlfriend is ran in background mode and the sound is turned off.
Unfortunately, I can't find the switch to turn the sound off. Therefore, I have to run both of them separately. Girlfriend also seems to have a problem coexisting with my Golf program, often trying to abort Golf with some form of timing incompatibilities.
I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance from GirlFriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with Girlfriend 2.0. He said I probably didn't have enough cache to run Girlfriend 2.0 and eventually it would require a Token Ring to run properly. He was right, as soon as I purged my cache, and realized that no one in their right mind is installing new token rings, Girlfriend 2.0 uninstalled itself.
Shortly after that, I installed Girlfriend 3.0 beta. Unfortunately, there was a bug in the program and the first time I used it, it gave me a virus. I had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while. I very cautiously upgraded to Girlfriend 4.0. This time I used SCSI probe first and also installed a virus protection program. It worked okay for a while until I discovered that GirlFriend 1.0 was still in my system. I tried running Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 still installed, but Girlfriend 4.0 has a feature I didn't know about that automatically senses the presence of any other version of Girlfriend and communicates with it in some way. This results in the immediate removal of both versions.
The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of GirlFriend, it is written in some obscure language I can't understand, much less reprogram. Frankly, I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality.
Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts and I have never liked how GirlFriend is “object-oriented.”
A year ago a friend of mine upgraded his version of Girlfriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend. He discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiance 1.0. So he did, but soon after that, he had to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a huge resource hog. It has taken up all his space: He can't load anything else. One of the primary reasons he decided to go with Wife 1.0 was because it supposedly came bundled with a feature called FreeSex Plus.
Well, it turns out the resource requirements of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug-ins he wanted to try. On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. Although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw which has an automatic pop-up feature he can't turn off. I told him to trying installing Mistress 1.0, but he said he heard if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before uninstalling itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won't install because of insufficient resources.
P.S. Watch out for the K-I-D-S virus because they have an insatiable appetite for memory and CPU time over and above everything else above.
Man with Gas Bill
In March 1992 a man living in Newton (near Boston), Massachusetts received a bill for his as yet unused gas line stating that he owed $0.00.
He ignored it and threw it away.
In April he received another and threw that one away too. The following month the gas company sent him a very nasty note stating they were going to cancel his gas line if he didn't send them $0.00 by return mail. He called them, talked to them, they said it was a computer error and they could take care of it.
The following month he decided that it was about time that he tried out the troublesome gas line figuring that if there were usage on the account it would put an end to his ridiculous predicament. However, when he went to use the gas, it had been cut off. He called the gas company who apologized for the computer error once again and said that they would take care of it.
The next day he got a bill for $0.00 stating that payment was now overdue. Assuming that having spoken to them the previous day the latest bill was yet another mistake and he ignored it, trusting that the company would be as good as their word and sort the problem out.
The next month he got a bill for $0.00 stating that he had 10 days to pay his account or the company would have to take steps to recover the debt. Finally, giving in, he thought he would play the company at their own game and mailed them a check for $0.00. The computer duly processed his account and returned a statement to the effect that he now owed the gas company nothing at all.
A week later, the man's bank called him asking him what he was doing writing a check for $0.00. After a lengthy explanation the bank replied that the $0.00 check had caused their check processing software to fail. The bank could therefore not process ANY checks from ANY of their customers that day because the check for $0.00 was causing the computer to crash.
The following month the man received a letter from the gas Company claiming that his check had bounced and that he now owed them $0.00 and unless he sent a check by return of post they would be taking steps to recover the debt.
The man, who had been considering buying his wife a computer for her birthday, bought her a typewriter instead.
Engineers & Relationships
An architect, an artist and an engineer were discussing whether it was better to spend time with the wife or a mistress. The architect said he enjoyed time with his wife, building a solid foundation for an enduring relationship. The artist said he enjoyed time with his mistress, because of the passion and mystery he found there. The engineer said, "I like both." "Both?" Engineer: "Yeah. If you have a wife and a mistress, they will each assume you are spending time with the other woman, and you can go to the plant and get some work done."
The Engineer and the Frog
An engineer was walking through a park one day when a frog called out to him, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."
He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week."
The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket.
The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for a week and do anything you want."
Again the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket.
Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you that I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll stay with you for a week, and that I'll do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?"
The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend; but a talking frog, now that's cool."
Train Tickets
Three lawyers and three engineers are traveling by train to a conference.
At the station, the three lawyers each buy tickets and watch as the three engineers buy only a single ticket.
"How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" asked one of the three lawyers.
"Watch and you'll see," answers one of the engineers.
They all board the train. The lawyers take their respective seats but all three engineers cram into a restroom and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, "Ticket, please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand.
The conductor takes it and moves on. The lawyers saw this and agreed it was quite a clever idea. So after the conference, the lawyers decide to copy the engineers on the return trip and save some money. When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip.
To their astonishment, the engineers don't buy a ticket at all. "How are you going to travel without a ticket," asks one perplexed lawyer.
"Watch and you'll see," says one of the engineers.
When they board the train the three lawyers cram into a restroom and the three engineers cram into another one nearby. The train departs.
Shortly afterward, one of the engineers leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the lawyers are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, "Ticket, please."
What Engineers Do
What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?
Mechanical Engineers build weapons while Civil Engineers build targets.