• markovs_gun@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 day ago

    I can only imagine the euphoric mixture of dread and excitement that the engineer who came up with that one must have had right before presenting it to the rest of the team. The realization that all hope for normal solutions had been lost and abnormal solutions were needed, combined with the requirement of absolute confidence in these facts to present this to managers. I am jealous, this is a feeling most engineers only get a few times in their careers.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      4 hours ago

      I am sorry but this is a ridiculous consipiracy theory, I have never met a single engineer in my life who wouldn’t be laughing maniacally (all fear irradiated in a recursive, exhaustive employment of their analytical mind to a hypothesis, plan and then blueprints) as they stumbled out of their cubicle hole they had imprisoned themselves in for the last 8 hours to their coworkers respectful, knowing but still mildly concerned distant acknowledgement brandishing an attitude and persona that looks to the untrained eye COMPLETELY like somebody impersonating Charlie from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, but the room of fellow scientists and engineers know the engineer has either truthfully reached a point where their idea is shit and they have lost their sanity and ability to state why or they have just pulled the funniest joke on everybody else they ever will in their entire career in the process of saving the day. Somehow, if you could freeze time and ask everybody in that room to bet which eventuality will reveal itself to be true, nobody in the room would bet that the engineer had lost their sanity, no matter the crazed performance in front of their boss and basically everybody else important to their stupidly narrow niche of engineering, they trust the engineer’s desire to make amazing shit happen implicitly for no more complex reason their life is if nothing else proof of that axiom being the core of their organism… and look now… they have the same wild look in their eye of “…ha good jok… wait no… that is a dumb idea but… oh I am going to be SO annoyed if this ends up actually working but ok… give me a pen and paper!!!”.

      I imagine to an untrained eye this might appear quite like a complete outbreak of madness, but I don’t see how it could have happened any other way.

    • FistingEnthusiast@lemmynsfw.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      45
      ·
      2 days ago

      I was just about to say that

      I worked on something that literally said “to test this thing, hit it here with a screwdriver” because it was known to be a point where a soldered joint would fail

      I used to bash the shit out of some stuff with a hammer to prove my diagnoses. It wasn’t working anyway, so I couldn’t break it more, and I was usually proved correct when I was able to replicate the failure

      • towerful@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        42
        ·
        2 days ago

        The whole “well, it’s already broken: what’s the worst I can do?” is such a liberating position to be in.

        • FistingEnthusiast@lemmynsfw.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          41
          ·
          2 days ago

          I have learnt how to fix a whole lot of things after realising that

          Or, I learnt other things that can go wrong, without consequences

          However, there’s: “it’s not working right” and there’s “it’s not working”… It’s usually important to recognise that difference

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        Was doing this with my car fob for a while before I finally broke down and re-soldered the battery contact terminal to the board yesterday.

        Also doing it to my cars blower fan for the AC. I have the replacement fan motor, but it hasn’t been annoying enough yet to mess with replacing.

  • Wilco@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    2 days ago

    If a Mars lander hits itself with a shovel and no one is around to hear it … does it make a sound?