I had a dream the other night. Actually, I have dreams most nights, but I rarely remember them, and most of the ones I remember tend to fade from my conscious memory rather quickly. From time to time, though, memory fragments stick around long enough for me to wonder what in the world is going on in my brain while I sleep.
I was in the laundry room, in the basement of our house. Everything was as it should be, except that the old washer and dryer that I had replaced were sitting in the middle of the room. The dryer was spinning furiously, and suddenly the door broke off its hinges. The door wasn’t the solid metal door the old dryer actually had, but one of those indented glass doors you find on a front-loading washer (meanwhile, the washer was the old top-loader we had). I shut the dryer off and considered the damage. The sharpest details of the dream were my assessment of the dryer door hinges. I immediately realized that one was a quick and easy fix, but the other involved torn metal and would require either some riveting or a new hinge assembly. The rest of the dream has faded into oblivion, its weirdness and improbability forgotten and dismissed, but the little details of the hinges, the processing of the situation, the automatic and reflexive assessment of what could and should be done – those remain vividly in my memory.
Last spring, my wife and I took a vacation to wine country in northern California. As we wandered around the grounds of a particular winery’s tasting room, admiring an elaborate trellis, my eyes sought out the joinery and fasteners that held the trellis together. I started estimating the spacing, noting the dimensions of the timbers, and taking in the structural design of the the thing. I approved of the construction and took some photos for reference should the day come when I choose to build one of my own.
A number of years back, I was sitting in a meeting when someone came in late, put his briefcase on the table and opened it to retrieve some notes. Where did my eyes go first? To the hinges of the briefcase. I considered how they were attached to the case, noticed the offset that allowed them to operate without abrading the inside of the case, the notch and lock-tab that held them straight… you get the idea.
This is my life, this is my brain. From many conversations, I’ve learned that this isn’t typical. Most folks don’t look at things this way, nor do they process what they see in this fashion.
Did I mention that I’m an engineer? An engineer by education, by experience, and, it seems, by calling.
As a child, I enjoyed playing with tools. No surprise there – many boys do. But, I also enjoyed reading about how to use them, and I recall writing notes on index cards about hammer styles, different types of chisels, block planes and other oddments. When I was old enough to take wood shop classes in junior high school, I took to carpentry like a fish to water. Oh, I made many mistakes, I was certainly no prodigy, but I loved it. Soon, I was spending much of my free time hanging around in the wood shop with like-minded classmates, and it seemed inevitable that I would end up in engineering school. Sure enough, I got a degree in aeronautical engineering and went to work for a defense contractor.
For a list of reasons unrelated to engineering, that first career ended 20 years ago. I did, along the way, expand my interest and skills beyond carpentry to auto repair, basic electrical and plumbing work and the various other things one needs to know to do home improvement and handyman work, but that seems almost an afterthought to the engineer mindset that filters all I see, read and hear. It’s hard to say whether the mindset was always there, whether it was inculcated by four years of education and ten years of work, or whether the latter merely shaped and enhanced the former. No matter what I might conclude in that chicken-egg debate, one thing is certain. No matter what I do, no matter what careers my life-path brings me to and through, I will always see the world through engineer-filtered glasses.
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