A retort. A short.

To break the third wall for a second: If you haven't noticed I've been mixing in serious posts with less serious one. I've designated the two through the symbolic marker Short. If you see that word in the title, try not to take the content too seriously, as I don't. Also lately I've been trying to comment on more ‘blogs both liberal and conservative. I've always seen it as my prerogative to play devil's advocate and argue liberalism to the conservatives and vice versa, but both of you feel free to argue with each other too.

This story takes place two years ago when the college I was in made me take an engineering design course. This course was centered on small groups of engineers (like myself) designing a product. Unfortunately the course was far more concerned with the technical aspects such as, reports and documentation, rather than the actual finished product. So to make up for this lack of emphasis on the designs which we made, the esteemed professors decided to have a competition where our products would be compared and then sold off to the RIC (which is a hospital in Chicago for the disabled). Our assignment had been to design a book holder for quadriplegics. People who couldn't hold the book open themselves.

I had been assigned to a crack team of engineers, who had done a great job on the documentation and left actually building the thing to me. I'm actually fairly proud of how it came out, considering I wrote the blueprints after it was finished (a method I highly suggest), but it wasn't great or anything. In fact, no one’s was. We'd been given ten weeks to do something we had no experience in, so the results were less than stunning. So there I was sitting in front of the odd look book holder that I would be presenting, and a half assed poster which had a single picture, when some members from another group strolled up. It took me a few minutes to realize that they had been going from one group to another "sizing up the competition."

I cannot begin to explain how incredibly stupid I thought this was, but after they demanded a demonstration I decided to tell them. "Are you joking me? Who cares whether it can hold open a textbook or not? Its not like a text book needs to be held open, anything that heavy will hold itself open by weight alone. But more importantly why do you care? This is a stupid project we've all been forced into so the school can pass us off as if we are engineers without actually haven't to go through the bother of training us first. Do you really care whether or not your design is considered the best? Do you think winning this thing is going to get you some prestigious job somewhere? Make your career? You're designing a book holder for people who are stuck in a hospital all day because they can't move around on their own. Is this your way of pretending to care? If you actually gave a shit about them you'd go down there and spend time with them. I'm sure they'd much prefer some actual human interaction to some crappy book holder prototype. Let me ask you this, when you went down there for initial testing, did you ask any of them how they were doing? Did you pretend to care about their lives then? You're the one using greed as a poor substitute for moral fiber, and you have the gall to question me about my commitment? Don't worry though I'm sure no one here will mistake your Hypocrisy for actual Engineering."

Or at least that's what I should have said.

Taken from the life of Jim Tzenes