You Might Be an Engineer If...

• You have no life and can prove it mathematically.
• You can remember 7 passwords, but not your anniversary.

• Dilbert is your hero.

• You have "Dilbert” comics displayed anywhere in your work area.

• You know vector calculus but you can't remember how to do long division.

• You assume that a "horse" is a "sphere" in order to make the math easier.

• When you agree with someone, instead of saying "Yeah" or "Okay", you say "Obviously" or "Clearly."

• "Big O" has a totally different meaning to you.

• If you have ever seen a second order nonhomogenous differential equation.

• If the numbers 1.414 and 0.707 look familiar.

• If you know more geometric formulas than you have friends.

• If you flash the right hand rule like it is your gang sign.

• If you are most productive between 12 and 3 am.

• If you know constants, conversions and orders of magnitude better than you know addition and subtraction.

• The only jokes you receive are through e-mail.

• All your sentences begin with “What if”.

• At Christmas, it goes without saying that you will be the one to find the burned-out bulb in the string.

• To you "couples" and "moments" have nothing to do with love.

• You use Greek lettersjust as often as English.

• People groan at the party when you pick out the music.

• The blinking 12:00 on someone’s VCR draws you in like a tractor beam to fix it.

• You know what a tractor beam is.

• You can name at least six Star Trek episodes.

• You have ever debated who was a better captain: Kirk or Picard.

• You can quote scenes from any Monty Python movie.

• You do Darth Vader or Battlestar Galactica impressions by talking into a spinning fan.

• You ever forgot to get a haircut … for 6 months.

• You find yourself at the airport on your vacation studying the baggage handling equipment.

• You have ever owned a calculator with no equals key and know what RPN stands for.

• You have ever saved the power cord from a broken appliance.

• You have memorized the Discovery Channel programming schedule, but have seen most of the shows already.

• You know how to take the cover off your computer, and what size screwdriver to use.

• You know the direction the water swirls when you flush.

• You look forward to Christmas only to put together the kid’s toys.

• You own one or more white short-sleeve dress shirts.

• You think your computer looks better without the cover.

• You thought the contraption ET used to phone home was stupid.

• You walk around with your hands in your two front pockets 99% of the time.

• You wear black shoes with white socks (or vice versa).

Black shoes with white socks: cool or fashion faux pas?
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• You window shop at Radio Shack.

• You’ve already calculated how much you make per second.

• You’ve ever tried to repair a $5 radio.

• Everyone else on the Alaskan cruise is on deck peering at the scenery, and you are still on a personal tour of the engine room.

• In college you thought Spring Break was a metal fatigue failure.

• The salespeople at Circuit City can't answer any of your questions.

• You are always late to meetings.

• You are at an air show and know how fast the skydivers are falling.

• You bought your spouse a new CD ROM for his/her birthday.

• You go on the rides at Disneyland and sit backwards in the chairs to see how they do the special effects.

• You have more friends on the Internet than in real life.

• You have used coat hangers and duct tape for something other than hanging coats and taping ducts.

• You see a good design and still have to change it.

• You spent more on your calculator than on your wedding ring.

• You still own a slide rule and you know how to work it.

• You think that when people around you yawn, it's because they didn't get enough sleep.

• You're in the back seat of your car, everyone else is looking at the moon, and you're trying to locate a geosynchronous satellite.

• You know what the geosynchronous satellite function is.

• If you didn't know what geosynchronous satellite function is, now you really want to know.

• You're actually curious enough about geosynchronous satellite function to click here and read about it.

• Your laptop computer costs more than your car.

• Your wrist watch has more computing power than a 300 MHz Pentium.

• You chuckle whenever anyone says "centrifugal force".

• You've actually used every single function on your graphing calculator.

• It is sunny and 70 degrees outside, and you are working on a computer.

• You have a pet named after a scientist.

• You laugh at jokes about mathematicians.

• You can't remember what's behind the door in the engineering building which says "Exit".

• You have to bring a jacket with you, in the middle of summer, because there's a wind-chill factor in the lab.

• You are completely addicted to caffeine.

• You avoid doing anything because you don't want to contribute to the eventual heat-death of the universe.

• You bring a computer manual/technical journal as vacation reading.

• You have a habit of destroying things in order to see how they work.

• You have never backed up your hard drive.

• Your favorite James Bond character is "Q," the guy who makes the gadgets.

• You have half-broken objects in your house that you refuse to throw away with the hope that you can someday fix them.

• You spend time looking at household products trying to devise a method for improvement.

• You actually buy technical books.

• You think that your way is the best way to do everything and constantly challenge ideas.

• You solder tools together to form new objects.

• You prefer eating dinner from cans that have the pop top on them.

• You like to point out faults in movies regarding machines.

• You know "natural frequency" has nothing to do with bowel movements.

• You tell people that time travel is impossible.

• After you tell people that time travel is impossible, minutes later you think of how you would build a time machine.

• You get angry when people won't let you fix things they've broken.

• You tried to build Transformer toys out of legos as a kid.

• You tried to invent various lego contraptions in the hope of making money when you were a kid.

• You consider a databook "good reading" when you're on the toilet.

• You have a watch or clock that automatically synchronizes itself, and/or you have a bookmark on your browser pointing to the atomic clock.

• You’ve named a computer.

• Your spouse sends you an e-mail instead of calling you to dinner.

• You like to pick out inconsistencies in The Matrix and Lord of the Rings.

• You reason that a wireless LAN is a toy your kid would enjoy.

• You inform people during Star Wars, that the ships in should all be silent in space. You have to...you just can't let a thing like that slide.

• You own a set of itty-bitty screw drivers, but you don't remember where they are.

• You rotate your screen savers more frequently than your automobile tires.

• You can't remember where you parked your car for the 3rd time this week.

• You thought the real heroes of "Apollo 13" were the mission controllers.

• Your favorite character on Gilligan's Island was "The Professor".

• People hound you for pocket protectors, safety goggles, and lab coats at Halloween.

• You always have to explain things by drawing it out on paper or a napkin.

• You take your laptop on vacation.

• You're bugged because this list isn't numbered.

• You recognize the importance of exercising your circuit breakers--and do it on the day the time changes because the clocks will be messed up anyway.

• Buying something nice for your spouse or spending the money to upgrade your RAM is a moral dilemma.

• You have never bought any new underwear or socks for yourself since you got married.

• You carry on a one-hour debate over the expected results of a test that actually takes five minutes to run.

• You are convinced you can build a phaser out of your garage door opener and your camera's flash attachment.

• You have introduced your kids by the wrong name.

• You rooted for HAL.

• You think of the gadgets in your office as "friends" but forget to send your father a birthday card.

• You think a pocket protector is a fashion accessory.

• You think T-shirt and jeans are formal dress.

• You speak in acronyms.

• You have a non-technical vocabulary of 800 words.

• You can prove that, according to Heisenberg, your work or homework could be anywhere in the world!

• You know the second law of thermodynamics but not your shirt size.

• You make four sets of drawings and seven revisions before making a bird bath building a deck in your back yard.

• You carry spare AAA batteries in your briefcase or purse.

• Your idea of good interpersonal communication means getting the decimal point in the right place.

• Your ideal evening consists of fast-forwarding through the latest sci-fi movie looking for technical inaccuracies.

• You think the value of a book is directly proportional to the amount of tables, charts and graphs it contains.

• Your three-year-old son asks why the sky is blue and you try to explain atmospheric absorption theory.

• You explain how surface tension works when your 10-year-old asks why you are adding oil to boiling spaghetti.

• You have a clock with inverted numbers that runs counter-clockwise in your office and you prefer it that way.

• You have ever thought about how coffee changes color in the body.

• You use a CAD package to design your son's Pine Wood Derby car.

• You try to explain entropy to strangers at your table during casual dinner conversation.

• You read this page for the first time on a Saturday night.

• You own "Official Star Trek" anything.

• You ever burned something down with your Science Fair project.

• You watch reruns of X-Files.

• You not only know the names of the astronauts but the exact date and time of the first lunar landing (3:17 PM CDT, July 20, 1969).

• You use engineering paper for everyday correspondence.

• Someone comments on the "mirage" effect in the desert as a reflection of water you must correct them since it is actually refraction of light.

• You have a favorite brand of mechanical pencil.

• You carry spare lead for your mechanical pencil.

• Spilling coffee while on the phone is such a common occurrence for you that you don't even miss a beat in your conversation as you scramble to move things aside and dab at the papers on your desk.

• You consistantly flip the TV to the NASA channel so not to miss a broadcast and what the heck, the NASA logo adds a certain ambience to your decor.

• Your favorite actor is R2D2.

• Your child asks for help with a model airplane and you take over insisting that there are design flaws.

• You have any of the following personalized items: hardhat, safety goggles, calculator case or slide rule.

• You really like Geek t-shirts.

• You automatically associate the words “sexy,” “beautiful” and “new butterfly valve.”

• You stare at an orange juice container because it says concentrate.

• You've ever said, "Oh yes, it's supposed to look like that."

• You can't comprehend why everyone doesn't want to be an Engineer.

• Your spouse hasn't the foggiest idea what you do at work.

• You have modified your can-opener to be microprocessor driven.

• When someone asks "What's new?" you answer "C over lambda".

• When your family is expecting, you are more interested in the ultrasound equipment than the test results.

• You need a spreadsheet to figure out who owes what for lunch.

• You think in "math".

• You can't write unless the paper has both horizontal and vertical lines.

• You can assign a physical unit to every letter in the English alphabet.

• You type on your calculator using more than one finger.

• When faced with a tough partial differential equation, you start assuming everything as negligible.

• You comment to your spouse that his/her straight hair is nice and parallel.

• You have a functioning home copier machine, but every toaster you own turns bread into charcoal.

• Your spouse keeps reassuring you that the way you dress is no reflection on him/her.

• You frequently whistle the theme song to "MacGyver".

• You find Matlab extremely useful.

• You know calculus isn’t a high level math.

• You know the significance of the number "42".

• You love the board game Risk and are excited about the online version.

• You never have plans for the weekend.

• You discuss math and physics at the dinner table.

• You drive a Gremlin with a "Beam me up Scotty" bumper sticker.

• You just don't have the heart to throw away the 100-in-1 electronics kit you got for your 9th birthday.

• You order pizza over the internet.

• You talk about the high resolution and picture-in-picture capability of your big screen TV while everybody is watching the Superbowl.

• You love Dr. Who and know the history of the Daleks.

• Politically correct people call you "organizationally challenged".

• Your favorite place in San Francisco is the Exploratorium.

• You enjoy pointing out that at the end of "The Wizard of Oz", after the scarecrow gets his brain, he shows it off by spouting a nonsensical, incorrect fact about isosceles triangles.

• You walk into a room and notice that a picture is hanging crooked so you buy a CAD system and spend the next six months designing a solar-powered, self-adjusting picture frame while often stating aloud your belief that the inventor of the nail was a total moron.

• You know Avogadro's number.

• You have dressed as "Dark Matter" for Halloween.

• You've actually tried to build your own "Rube Goldberg Machine".

• Your favorite television show is NOVA.

• Your idea of a "good read" is the Edmund Scientific catalog.

• You just spent an inordinate amount of time exploring this list.

Sources:

Amjad's Blog
Back Talk
Brinkmanonline.com
Chainletters.net
ChemicalProcessing.com
Defective Engineer
Earth to Omar
The EE Compendium

Engineer Identification Test
inflection-point.com
lizswwworld.com
Lost-Libyan
netjeff.com
Niniane's Blog
The Power to PassProgressive.org
RF Cafe
sympatico.ca
Think Geek
What I've liked to have said