ot Engineer vs physicist.

[misterroy]

A physicist and engineer were roommates in college. One night a fire broke out in their apartment. The engineer woke up first and saw the fire. He rem embered the fire extinguisher in every unit, grabbed it and pulled the pin, as instructed, and sprayed the fire with the sodium bicarbonate contained within.

Incredibly, the next night, the exact same fire sprung up in their apartmen t. The physicist was the first to wake up this time. He saw the fire, saw t he fire extinguisher, then went back to bed happy knowing there was a solut ion to the problem.

[AnthonyL]

Not quite - it is the mathematician who observes there is a solution and goes back to bed, for this and others:

[Graham.]

It works better for me if it's an Engineer and a technician, note the capital "E" and the small "t".

The Engineer is the one who goes back to bed.

[newshound]

Do you remember the Scrapheap Challenge (I think) with a team of ex-servicemen where the NCO had better ideas than the officers (and, to their credit, they let him get on with it).

I put a deliberately diverse team into the Great Egg Race first series consisting of myself (as a young graduate scientist) with a line manager and a technician. That was in the days when there was such a thing as a lab tech. Not wishing to boast, but at least in the live practical we beat the Harwell team of three "scientists".

[newshound]

In the tribology world, we had a version of the guillotine joke where the victims were an English Tribologist, a Scottish Tribologist, and (of course) an Irish Tribologist.

(To simplify somewhat, tribology is the science of friction, lubrication and wear).

[whisky-dave]

for me it's better with administration and the real world.

I've just had to send a guarded complaint about about the fire exit situation in the lab. Last time I did that was 7 years ago, do you think I'm repeating myself to often ?

[Brian Gaff]

And what about the mac user whose quoting changes all the characters to = signs, what does he or she do? Brian

[whisky-dave]

That sign means equal-ity, it's like being a cataholic rather than a catholic