The Engineer - That´s why he is a hive of totally pointless activity, for wich we give him thanks

Os Engenheiros, na sua imagem empresarial, simpatizam com imagens de indivíduos com capacetes, réguas sobre uma mesa, uma caneta na ponta da mão, braços cruzados numa fotografia, fato e gravata. Tudo isto resulta da tentativa patética e vã, de obter um estatuto semelhante a um Arquiteto, ora nós Arquitetos somos menos formais.

Given the immense mounds of paper it produces, you would think that business would need people who know how to string a grammatical sentence together. Curiously, this is not the case: "bookish types", as they are contemptuously know, are not held in high regard. They don´t have "pratical skills"; they are "dreamers". By contrast the engineer knows how to make things. He (and it almost always is a "he") has studied mathematics, and maths, as everyone knows, is a rational science.

The Engineer, then, is in touch with reality. He gets to the heart of the matter without over-complicating things. He is contemptuous of men (and even more so women), who are by their nature unreliable and the source of endless complications. His dream is total automation, "to within a millimetre" and "in real time", created by machines built so that you only need to press a button to get the required result. The Engineer is out of sync with the rest of us. He´s funny, but not deliberately so. His eccentricities would make him a enjoyable lunchtime companion if he weren´t such an oaf.

While he waits for the day when all life will run like a well-oiled machine, the engineer loves to solve problems. When there aren´t, he creates them. That´s why he is a hive of totally pointless activity, for wich we give him thanks. (...)

MAIER; Corinne; HELLO LAZINESS, Why hard work doesn´t pay, ORION BOOKS