Walking Among the Dilberts - Daryl Goes to the ASCE

Today, I walked among the Dilberts. That is to say, I attended a professional continuing education training session provided by the American Society of Civil Engineers. It was truly like stepping into a Dilbert comic strip. As I looked around the conference center full of my colleagues, I could not help but concede that as individuals and as a group, we engineers are, well ... odd. We look odd, we walk odd, we talk odd, we dress odd, and we have bad hair. We are personality-impaired. We get nervous in extreme social situations, like being in the same room as another human being. Take a hundred or so such individuals and place them in the same location, and a pleasant outcome should not be anticipated.

When asked to introduce and tell a little something interesting about ourselves, we will face the moderator with a face devoid of expression and state our name and employer. Go ahead, moderator, strap me to the table, drip water on my forehead and put bamboo strips under my fingernails. That's all the information the Geneva Convention says I have to provide, and that's all your getting out of me.

Yet, somewhere during the breakout group technical presentation, a transformation will take place. Someone will express a sincere doubt over a value routinely used for Young's modulus. Another will share an opinion regarding the merits of the PTI method of structural slab analysis for a given situation, as opposed to the WRI method for that same situation. Soon, engineers all over the room are baring their technical souls, sharing their innermost convictions, as well uncertainties, over the vicissitudes of technical analysis. And in that moment, as they converse freely on the thoughts that they ponder in their minds, their weirdness melts away. If you could turn down the volume so that you did not know the topic being discussed, it would appear to be a scene of normal people having a passionate conversation on a topic of great conviction. The engineers appear both human and humane.

I have been told that I am just about the average age for an engineer in America, somewhere in their mid-50's, and that fewer college students are choosing engineering as a field of study. Maybe as a nation we are becoming more cool. I have also been told that over the next two or three years, as a nation, more engineers will retire from their careers than will graduate from the universities. In other words, engineers that are retiring from the market place are not being replaced. This is happening at a time when our infrastructure (roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, power grid, etc.) is not sufficient to handle our current population, let alone any increases in population, plus the insufficient infrastructure we have is worn or wearing out and needs to be replaced. Levees and bridges fail, water distribution systems in large eastern cites are centuries old. Engineers in poistions of authority who clearly state the problem are replaced by engineers who will say everything is okay, at least for a another fiscal year.

Admittedly biased, I believe that while all honorable professions make their valid contributions, societies, from antiquity, are built by engineers. My hope for our society is that the American university system will once again make engineering an intelligible field of study, and capable students will return to this field, to produce the next generation of odd Dilberts who are most content to be left alone and moil in solitude, with time standing still as they ponder and unravel some technical mystery. By God's grace, I am looking forward to tomorrow, because once again I get to go back to the ASCE conference to sit and walk among the Dilberts.