The scene is a newspaper office. The editor says to one of his reporters: There’s a fire raging out of control west of town and I want you to get out there fast. And above all, get some good shots. If that means you have to hire an airplane, just do it. Don’t worry about the expense. So, the reporter calls the local FBO and orders a plane. He rushes out to the airport, spots a small aircraft with a young pilot in it, pulls open the door, jumps in and says to the pilot: Let’s go, take off. As directed, the pilot takes off, gets up to altitude, and the reporter then tells him: See that fire raging to the west? I want you to fly over that and get down as close as you can. Incredulous, the pilot says: You want me to fly over that fire? Sure, the reporter says, I am a photojournalist and that’s why I am here–to take dramatic shots of the fire! The pilot looks over with a quizzical look on his face and says: “You’re not the flight instructor?”

When Albert Einstein was making the rounds of the speaker’s circuit, he usually found himself eagerly longing to get back to his laboratory work. One night as they were driving to yet another rubber-chicken dinner, Einstein mentioned to his chauffeur (a man who somewhat resembled Einstein in looks & manner) that he was tired of speechmaking.

“I have and idea, boss,” his chauffeur said. “I’ve heard you give this speech so many times. I’ll bet I could give it for you.”

Einstein laughed loudly and said, “Why not? Let’s do it!”

When they arrive at the dinner, Einstein donned the chauffeur’s cap and jacket and sat in the back of the room. The chauffeur gave a beautiful rendition of Einstein’s speech and even answered a few questions expertly.

Then a supremely pompous professor asked an extremely esoteric question about anti-matter formation, digressing here and there to let everyone in the audience know that he was nobody’s fool.

Without missing a beat, the chauffeur fixed the professor with a steely stare and said, “Sir, the answer to that question is so simple that I will let my chauffeur, who is sitting in the back, answer it for me.”

Well, there are people who say “the glass is half empty” and there are people who say “the glass is half full.” There are others who would say “the glass is at 50% of capacity.” We call those people engineers.

We don’t let them near the microwave oven, for fear that they will take it apart and put it back together according to some twisted plan only they know, and the next time we go to melt some cheeze-whiz for our nachos, we wind up starting world war III. I’m a computer science major, so I frequently say “I don’t care how much stuff’s in the glass, just keep the damn thing away from the keyboard.”

Then the engineers laugh and say something like “I won’t spill this 591 milliliter container of mountain dew on your computer” which they of course immediately do, prompting a bitter argument followed by a violent brawl, which lasts for a number of minutes until someone notices that “Baywatch” is on, and everyone puts their differences aside and stares at the screen and says things like “There’s no way those can be real.” and an engineer does some quick calculations and says something like “the support structure alone would weigh several tons.” and a computer science major would say something like “Well, if they had an SGI and a 32 bit video card, they could use a 3-d modeler/renderer to texture map them on there…” and someone else would say “Who cares? Just look at ‘em.”

And then we would all agree that technology was wonderful, no matter how it worked, and then we all go down to Burger King and make fun of the English majors hard at work.

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