A collection of Engineer Jokes...

• There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical.  After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired.  Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine fixed, but to no avail.  In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge.  He spent a day studying the huge machine.  At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and proudly stated, "This is where your problem is."  The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges. The engineer responded briefly:
              One chalk mark                     $1
              Knowing where to put it        $49,999
  It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.

• Answers to the question, "What is Pi"
  Mathematician: Pi is the number expressing the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.
  Physicist: Pi is 3.1415927 plus or minus 0.000000005.
  Engineer: Pi is about 3.

• A mathematician, an engineer, and a physicist are being interviewed for a job.  In each case, the interview goes along routinely until the last question is asked: "How much is one plus one?"  Each of them suspects a trap, and is hesitant to answer.  The mathematician thinks for a moment, and says "I'm not sure, but I think it converges."  The physicist says "I'm not sure, but I think it's on the order of one."  The engineer gets up, closes the door to the office, and says "How much do you want it to be?"

• An Engineer, a Physicist, and a Mathematician all go to the same Conference.  University budgets being what they are, they all stay in the same cheap hotel.  Each room has the same floor plan, has the same cheap TV, the same cheap bed, and a small bathroom.  Instead of a sprinkler system, the hotel has opted for Fire Buckets.  The Engineer, Physicist, and Mathematician are all asleep in bed.  At about 2AM, the Physicist wakes up because he smells smoke.  He looks in the corner of the room and sees that the TV set is on fire!  He dashes into the bathroom, fills the Fire Bucket to overflowing with water, and drenches the TV set.  The fire goes out, and the Physicist goes back to sleep.  A little while later, the Engineer wakes because he smells smoke.  He looks in the corner of his room and sees that the TV set is on fire.  He grabs a handy envelope, estimates the BTU output of the fire, scribbles a quick calculation, then dashes into the bathroom and fills the Fire Bucket with just enough water to douse the flames.  He puts the fire out and goes back to sleep.  In a little while, the Mathematician wakes up to the smell of smoke.  He looks in the corner of his room and sees the TV on fire.  He looks into the bathroom and sees the Fire Bucket.  Having determined that a solution exists, he goes back to sleep.
  [OK, so that was a Mathematician joke...]

• Definition:  Engineering is the art of molding materials we do not fully understand into shapes we cannot fully analyze and preventing the public from realizing the full extent of our ignorance.

• Things Engineering School didn't teach:
  6. Theory tells you how a circuit works, not why it does not work.
  5. Always try to fix the hardware with software.
  4. Engineering is like having an 8 a.m. class and a late afternoon lab every day for the rest of your life.
  3. Overtime pay?  What overtime pay?
  2. Managers, not engineers, rule the world.
  1. Dilbert is a documentary.

• Question: What is the difference between Aeronautical Engineers and Civil Engineers?
  Answer: Aeronautical Engineers build weapons; Civil Engineers build targets.

• A pastor, a doctor and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. Engineer: What's with these guys?  We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!
  Doctor: I don't know, but I've never seen such ineptitude!
  Pastor: Hey, here comes the greenskeeper. Let's have a word with him.  [dramatic pause]  Hi, George. Say, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?
  George: Oh, yes, that's a group of blind firefighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime.
  The group was silent for a moment.
  Pastor: That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.
  Doctor: Good idea.  And I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there's anything he can do for them.
  Engineer: Why can't these guys play at night?

• In the high school gym, all the girls in the class were lined up against one wall, and all the boys against the opposite wall.  Then, every ten seconds, they walked toward each other until they were half the previous distance apart.  A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were asked, "When will the girls and boys meet?"  The mathematician said: "Never."  The physicist said: "In an infinite amount of time."   The engineer said: "Well... in about two minutes, they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."

• "An Engineer's Take on Santa"
  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 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 distribute 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--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 thousands 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 reentering the earth's atmosphere.  The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 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 mps 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.