I attended an early Thanksgiving this past Saturday and loved it. It was a small group of about half engineers and half non-engineers. There are, I’m sure, better ways to categorize these people, but seeing as how so many were indeed engineers it seemed to makes sense to call the rest of us non-engineers.

We were a medical professional, an entrepreneur, a lawyer, and an HR specialist.

They were three engineers plus the occasional call from two of my own engineers.

That notwithstanding, the food was fabulous and the company was good. We talked and laughed. We ate, drank and were merry. The female engineer among us, though, seemed to think that I couldn’t possibly know any real engineers. So I told her about JJ who is a computer engineer. 

“And where is he tonight?” she asked, accusingly.
“At a soccer game,” I replied, uncertain of the upcoming course of conversation.
“He plays sports?!”

I then told her about M Marine who is a chemical engineer.

“And where is he?”
“Babysitting the reactors,” I said, “and out of state.”
“So you don’t really know him,” she said, laughing.

“I know a civil engineer that I traveled to Paris with.”
“Urban planners can’t really be called engineers, now can they?”

It was only then that I realised I was fighting a losing battle. I’d walked in to a party where I was horribly overdressed, even dressed as casually as I was, and then had proceeded to make myself seem like even more of an outsider by offering everyone drinks as though I lived there.

What did they want me to do, though, just get juice for myself and to hell with all of you?

I was thankful to have a situation where I could learn humility.

Still, as I said the food was wonderful. I also now have the distinct pleasure of being able to say I’ve had roasted chestnuts. Hard to say if these were the roasted chestnuts of Christmas song lore, but they were roasted and they were chestnuts. Mostly nutty, no real flavor. I did cut myself trying to shell one, so hazardous as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!