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Coping With Stress
By Paul Campbell
One of the truly unfortunate, and unforeseen, circumstances of engineering is that it is an incubator for mental stress. It wasn't until after I had been in the business for some time that it finally became clear to me why the college I attended had insisted that all engineering students take a minimum number of classes in psychology. The classes don't help you personally, but it teaches you to identify colleagues that are about to go postal so you can stay out of their way.
Perhaps it's because engineers are by definition dreamers, or maybe they're just a bunch of malcontents, but whatever the reason, all engineers have a dream. Generally that dream consists of anything that will get them out of engineering. Most of these dreamers actually toil after-hours toward their dream. I've known countless musicians of one type or another over the years. Even I once studied evenings to become a symphonic trombone player. Of course my wife eventually enlightened me that it would soon become difficult to continue dreaming with the imprint of her cast iron frying pan in the back of my head. Apparently four hours a night of a cappella trombone is more enjoyment than any one person can handle.
I've also known a few engineer/real estate investors. They seemed to be doing reasonably well, although admittedly they were always frightfully edgy during the month of April, especially around the middle of the month. Unfortunately their dream didn't produce any regularly occurring disposable income. They did however manage to dispose of a good deal of their income on rental unit repairs.
A number of engineering people, especially men, have quit engineering and gone into the construction trades. Don't be surprised if the next time you call a plumber or roofer to find out that he has a master's degree in engineering. Of course to my knowledge there isn't a school that offers a master's degree in plumbing or roofing.
One fellow I used to work with recently finished his master's degree and is working on a doctorate in psychology. I'm not certain, but I have reason to believe he is doing his dissertation on the motivation of people to get out of engineering, or what we refer to as the Please Kill Me Syndrome.
If you've never had the opportunity to spend any time in an engineering department, or a sanitarium, then you are probably unaware of why this seemingly exciting field of expertise would breed stress. First of all, fighting building fires from the inside out is exciting. Engineering on the other hand involves drawing countless miles of mind-numbing line to develop highly accurate pictures of things to provide answers to questions that haven't been asked yet. Secondly, engineering involves wading through reams of calculus, the outcome of which people's lives depend on, while your manager with an MBA who earns four times as much can barely remember how to add and subtract. Finally, whatever you do is either not right, not enough, or not the way somebody else would have done it.
We are all to blame for this last one. Not a person living has not at one time or another attempted to fix a car, repair a household appliance, or rearrange the furniture without saying, "Why the devil did they ever put that there?" Because the person that designed the engine block worked in a different state than the person that designed the alternator, and the person that did the assembly drawing neither knew nor cared what the other two had in mind.
To cope with this otherwise overwhelming deluge of stress, engineering people find just about any way available to them to relieve the pressure. Despite the reputation held by dentists, alcohol abuse or drug addiction are nearly prerequisite to holding a job in engineering. Your corn flakes get soggy in vodka just as fast as they do in milk, but by the time you get to the bottom of the bowl you don't care. It's a fairly well known fact that singer John Denver started his career as an architectural draftsman, but I've always suspected that Keith Richards probably spent an extended period of time working secretly in engineering as well.
While I was a design manager at the offices of Enigmatic Engineering, Wally Binderson showed up for an interview in a cab. My boss hired Wally on as a design checker almost immediately, and presented him to me to join my group. Shortly into the first week I realized the cause of the cab was because Wally had been too drunk to drive to the interview. Not having the authority to get rid of Wally, and incidentally working in a union state where treason is not considered just cause for dismissal, I attempted to keep him away from anything critical.
What I failed to keep him away from was another problem child in the group, Timmy Ohwowsky. Timmy typically contained slightly more pharmaceuticals than a Warner-Lambert warehouse, and was very probably the nation's second largest consumer of drugs after the American Red Cross. Both being of the misguided impression that a twelve-step program was something you signed up for at a fitness center, the two soon became fast friends.
Apparently Binderson and Ohwowsky had some sort of personal bet going as to whether controlled or uncontrolled substances were the true road to Nirvana. Early on after they were hired in I had the poor judgment one day to attempt speaking to them directly after lunch. While diplomatically trying to explain to them that lunch did not end at three in the afternoon, they both simultaneously belched in my general direction. When I awoke several hours later in the hospital there was a counselor asking me how I was and offering me some literature on staying at the Betty Ford Clinic. Fortunately the restraints on the bed were well designed and prevented me from rising up and grabbing him by the throat.
Shortly after this incident I rapidly developed chronic nervous dyspepsia. I'm not entirely certain if it was caused just by Binderson and Ohwowsky, or if it was a combination of them and the fact that my boss had also hired my wife Bev to work for me. Although I believe now years later that the later of these incidents may actually have been the cause of us both needing dental work more recently. Being constantly under scrutiny by our colleagues it would have been bad form to fight at work, which necessarily made us both resort to a lot of teeth grinding.
I have to admit that before I left Enigmatic Engineering, Ohwowsky did turn out some entertaining design drawings that would have made interesting conversation pieces had I had the forethought to frame them for my living room wall. On the last drawing I saw of his, several large and major components of a fairly complex machine were shown to be bolted to nothing. They just sort of existed in mid air. Other components were so miraculously complex for a simple function that I suspect he had either imagined them in a drug induced vision-quest, or conceivably retro-engineered them from things he remembered first hand from an alien abduction. Not that Ohwowsky ever claimed to have been to another planet, we just all suspected he was from another planet. "Greetings Earth people, I bring you a message of party from the planet Hion."
Virtually everybody at Enigmatic Engineering had some sort of social dysfunction. One of my minions, Moran DeCamp, was a pleasant, handsome young man, that was very easy to get along with and did good work on those occasions that he actually showed up for work. Moran was something of a lady's man, and frequently had difficulty finding his way to work from the ever-changing foreign surroundings he would wake up in. Apparently he was of the opinion that it was harder to hit a moving target, and since he was on the lam from the law for several years of back child support it seemed like a reasonable lifestyle to him. Unfortunately Moran also drove a motorcycle and had seen one too many reruns of Top Gun. I always prayed he wouldn't say, "I feel the need for speed" anywhere within earshot of Ohwowsky.
We were working on a hot project with what essentially constituted unlimited overtime. So as chance would have it, it was Saturday morning the day Moran called in to work. That in and of itself was not a good sign, because DeCamp never called in to work, he just wouldn't be there. When he called he actually opted to call one of my other designers, Flick, who was the brother of my boss and another recovering alcoholic. Flick hung up the phone and went into his brother's office, emerging several seconds later and going from person to person in the engineering lab talking in a hushed tone and taking a handful of cash from each person. At first I thought he had suddenly snapped and decided to give up engineering for a simpler life as a panhandler. Finally he came to me.
"Hey Paul, I'm taking up a collection to go bail Moran out of jail." Flick told me. It seems that a traffic cop had stopped Moran, ostensibly for doing a hundred in a twenty-five zone, and the cop had taken the effort to run his name through the NCIC (National Crime Information Center). I didn't even want to know. I kicked in whatever I had in my pocket, and several hours later Flick returned with the somewhat chagrined Moran in tow. "Gosh Moran, I don't remember you having a tattoo. Nice heart though. Who's Bubba?"
At this point I announced my resignation, and shortly thereafter moved across the county to Florida. Florida, unlike the state I had come from was an "open shop" state without the slightest notion of union influence on legislation. Although sexual perversion runs amuck like fire in a wax museum, people keep it at home because in Florida you can get fired because you burped during a meeting. Personally having something of a propensity toward flatulence I soon realized it was time to retire from engineering and take up something a little less stressful like freelance writing. I finally have a thorough understanding of the expression "Out of the frying pan and into the fire."
What's next?
