[taken from Snapshots From The Road by Alan Mowbray Jr. – cerca 2011 ]

One recent morning as I was writing at my computer there was a knock at the door. I opened it to admit two young engineers from a local architectural firm — they had stopped by to investigate some cracks in the facade of our beachfront condominium home that had caused our bedroom closet to leak badly during the last big rainstorm. They got down to business quickly, one entered notes into a hand-held computer while the other took photographs. When they had finished, the more vocal of the pair was kind enough to ask me if I was retired – since I am a white-haired man in my seventies who is legally blind, I found his question to be extremely polite.  Yes, I replied, adding, hesitantly ‘I used to be an engineer.’  Before I could elaborate further, my polite new acquaintance exclaimed “You’ll always be an engineer, you’re just not practicing at the moment!” 

They left after patting Ricky, my Labrador retriever guide-dog on the head, and I returned to my writing.  As I absently tapped the keys, I began to think about what the young man had said – although I haven’t practiced in my field for some years now, the engineering mind-set has always been there to tap into whenever I need it.  I find it especially useful when doing research in my new profession as a volunteer, writing natural history guide-books, essays, magazine stories and website content for our local tropical rainforest.

I can recall countless times during my professional career, when associates trained in ‘pure’ science would demean engineers as mere ‘techies’ or worse as ‘uncultured philistines.’  When confronted with this educational bias, I would remind the confronter that the word engineer is unrelated to the word engine, but is instead a derivation of the ancient Latin word ingenium, meaning ability — from which such modern English words as ingenious and ingenuity were derived.  Engineers, I would declare haughtily, spend their professional careers devising ingenious solutions for the hypotheses and theorems contrived (but seldom solved in practical terms) by ivory tower ‘pure’ science practitioners.

Over the years I learned to ignore such taunts, in part because I soon realized that like most prejudices, they were based on ignorance.  Engineers develop an early appreciation for the classics — it’s quite natural for us to bridge the mental gap from the theorems of Archimedes to the logic of Plato and Aristotle – we have even been known to read Homer, if only to try and grasp the design intricacies of Ulysses’ ships. Is it a quantum leap for an engineer to wander from a consideration of the scientific musings of Newton’s Laws of Motion to the mathematical purity of Beethoven’s music?  Not really. 

We engineers see ourselves as the glue that is necessary to bind scientific hypotheses together – an arrogant, but thoroughly pragmatic viewpoint.

As a blind person, I rely heavily on a combination of empirical reasoning and organizational skills that I learned and later practiced as an engineer. When I lost my eyesight to Glaucoma a decade ago, I was soon able to devise ‘ingenious’ solutions to this basic engineering problem, and I quickly compensated for the single sensory loss not by lowering my expectations, but instead by refining the use of my remaining senses to take-up the slack — a process known as de-rating, familiar to any trained electrical engineer. 

When considering a simple household project such as building a set of custom bookshelves over our bed, I work hand-in-hand with my wife Pamela, a retired teacher and school administrator – we form a design group – I am put in charge of empirically engineering the task at hand, which she then reviews, pointing out the realities of local logistics or the occasional impracticality of my designs — then we set to work as a team employing each partner’s best skills to complete the job.

Because of this attention to detail and organization, the results of our teamwork are often gratifying.

So, I reflected as I sat at my keyboard,  perhaps I had misrepresented myself to my new engineer friend – I continue to ‘practice’ my engineering skills, and will do so in one way or another until I draw my final breath.