Common Sense

I don’t have common sense.

I grew up in a very technically minded family. My mother is a very knowledgeable chemical engineer, and my father an equally knowledgeable technician & mechanic.  For nearly my entire life they have worked in the pharmaceutical industry in one aspect or another.

 

Dad.

Like for so many others there were times growing up when money was tight. When a car needed to be fixed it didn’t go to a shop.  My dad was out in the driveway on weekends for hours working on it until it was good enough to drive for another week.  He usually didn’t have all the correct specialty tools but found creative ways to do the job with what he had.  There are tools specific to almost every part of a car, we had and made do with little more than pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches, and sockets.  My brothers and I would be out there trying to help.  We didn’t always understand what it was we were helping with exactly, aside the obvious the car is broken.  Instead we acted as gophers and slowly gained some useful hands on knowledge.  With dad under the car wrenching on something, requests like “go get me a ½ inch, 6 point socket from the tool box” often resulted in “I said ½ inch, not 12 millimeter!”.  At that age I didn’t quite yet grasp the concept of units of measure.  In my defense I was in a hurry, it sounded like he needed it right now!  There was no time to notice the difference between the numbers ½ and 12.  If you were to check, the two sizes are by chance actually fairly close, at least the socket I got was 6 point.

Quite often and unprovoked he will begin explaining detailed pieces of information about astronomy and space travel, doing an approximate calculation involving earth orbits, or knowing the name of the dog of the one-time, second-tier producer of a b-movie from 1946 that nobody watched. The reason I have gained the nickname Wikipedia must be due to genetics.  There were occasions where I will start explaining some profound scientifically based concept to a coworker at my first job.  To this day I swear I could see his eyes glaze over as the words exiting out of my mouth would fly up and over his head as if they were magnetically repelled from him.  Of all the negative things I could say about that coworker, he was at least polite enough to smile and bob his head up and down as if he understood.  A wealth of useless information, I am.

 

Mom.

While I know she understands the what’s and the why’s of car repair, mom is less hands on with things like fixing cars. My brothers and I would always head for her for help with science and math questions.  I still do.  What an engineer was or did was a foreign concept to me at the time but I would always go ask the engineer.  As each science subject came up in school she would know more than enough to actually explain a concept instead of read the textbook with me.  Be it biology, earth science, physics, and chemistry (well duh), she had some working knowledge of it.  Honestly, dad had many of the answers too but mom was the engineer.  Later on as an engineering student I spent some time helping her by updating some CAD drawings at her work.  At the time they were renovating a section of the building and needed engineering floor plans.  I was documenting what my mom was designing.  I got to see what she actually did and the things she worked on with more detail than I had as a small kid visiting my parents at work many years before.

My brothers and I would often help her with things in the kitchen. Maybe it’s not normally thought of, but standard kitchen measurements eventually enforced my thinking about math; 3 teaspoons per tablespoon, 16 tablespoons per cup, 2 cups in a pint, and for water, a pint is a pound.   Much like in the driveway with dad, there were many occasions where my lack of knowledge on the subject resulted in some interesting meals and concoctions.  As similar as they look salt is not a substitute for sugar, garlic powder is not a substitute for onion powder, and shortening most certainly does not taste like butter!

I have gained a lot of seemingly random information from both my parents. Information on subjects that would otherwise seem out of place with each other.  Somehow, to me, it all belongs together.

 

Extended family.

Both of my parent’s families are full of engineers, programmers, and technicians. At holiday gatherings there are always stories of the goings-on with rockets, planes, electronics, and programming.  Much of what they talked about was way over my head at the time, but it was around me.  Information was absorbed.  My mom may have been the only one before me to complete an engineering degree, but more than one family member has gone on too a career that would eventually earn them the same title through experience.  Now at holiday gatherings I am part of those stories and conversations.  Some of the stories about rockets, planes, electronics, and programming are now my own.

 

School.

Maybe it was no surprise (after a slight detour of wanting to be an artist) when I decided to be an engineer. I certainly took a long way about it. Grandma once said I was “determined”, although stubborn and thickheaded would fit equally well.  I worked part time on an engineering-technology 2-year degree for quite some time.  When it was complete I transferred to another school and started on a similar 4-year degree.  I learned a lot of what happens after an engineer creates a specification and the machinist needs to follow it.  I learned how to use a lathe, mill, CNC, and tons of basic shop tools that I had never been around before.  Professors gave me access to their labs and equipment so I could work on my own projects.  They have even called me back several times to help with projects and equipment they are running.  After a year of maintaining a high GPA I got the bug in my head I really wanted to do graduate school.  I wanted a PhD and to not let anyone call me doctor, that word is reserved for the medical field.  Before graduating I transferred schools again to the local university which offered a mechanical engineering degree that lead right into graduate school.  At that last school I have completed my 4-year degree, a master’s degree, and am currently the only part-time PhD student I know of.  I’ve now had a few engineering jobs and am an adjunct lecturer at the very same university I currently take classes at for my PhD (conflict of interest, anyone?).  Professors and fellow students all seemed to expect different results from me than from most other students.  Almost as if I know things that they don’t.  That I contained some inborn understanding on the subject at hand.

I recently had surgery on my feet, bones needed moving. I’m sure the last thing my doctor/surgeon expected was a mechanical engineer patient who was more fascinated about the lever like motion of the bones and the titanium plates and screws, than I was concerned about having a surgery.  I even watched videos that would otherwise make someone about to have the surgery very nervous or scared.  I don’t usually seek out such information but I found it intriguing knowing what was going to be done with my feet.  I even listened to a podcast on how anesthesia works and how we still don’t know exactly what it does to render us unconscious.

 

Uncommon.

I developed in an environment where science, technology, engineering, and math were every day occurrences. They were used to explain many of the questions I had as a child and now to control the world around me as an engineer.  It wasn’t until I was older that I began to understand my kind of upbringing was not common.  I understand now that many of the people around me are the ones with a more common background.  An engineering friend once said to me “Why don’t they understand, its common sense”.  I no longer remember who or what the conversation was about but that friend reminded me months or years later of my response.  Apparently I had pointed out that as trained engineers, what we think of as common sense is no longer common with the majority of people around us.  We have learned to change our instincts.  While I was in that last stint as an undergrad I started to understand my background was less than usual.  I have engineered a path less traveled.  Much of my family, friends and the engineers I work with have a similar sense.  Things that are just basic and common to me tend to be exceptional information to others.  I now know not to expect everyone to understand things I consider second nature.

I don’t have common sense, mine is uncommon.