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Which Sheldon Cooper Quote Best Sums You Up as an Engineer?

It ought to be no surprise that the increasingly hilarious You Know You're an Engineer When... conversation has taken a hairpin turn toward Sheldonville, and I've been wondering how Dr. Cooper has influenced you as an engineer.

 

Which of his deadpan one liners rang particularly true for you, and which of his irritating idiosyncrasies made your friends and family cast a furtive glance in your direction when he said them?

 

I want to know which Sheldon Cooper quotes sum you up as an engineer, and I want you to be honest. Well, honest-ish, anyway. Okay, not honest at all -- just use this as flimsy pretext for jabbing each other in the engineering ribs.

Sheldon

  • Sheldon Cooper said

    "Don't you think if I were wrong, I'd know it?"

     

    I once worked with a guy who would have called himself an engineer - digital electronics and software.

     

    He had poster on his office wall which read:

     

    "I've only been wrong once - I thought I'd made a mistake!

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    Then that is exactly why you should watch it - it pits the character of the many Sheldon's we have dealt with directly against the engineer / sane scientist. Good for a laugh at least.

  • in reply to shabaz

    shabaz wrote:

     

    That's not off topic, Lego is always relevant ; )

    I like the whiteboard lego brick ; )

    So, is the Big Bang Theory's whiteboard like the Batcave chalkboard that TV's Batman would use to show Robin (and the audience) how to parse things like GHOTIO and ASSUME?

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    That's not off topic, Lego is always relevant ; )

    I like the whiteboard lego brick ; )

  • or...

    Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock; scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitate lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock.

  • You are mostly correct. The combination of a highly creative mind and usually a large amount of background in reading needed for engineering, creates a highly fertile environment for exchange. Also remember Sheldon is a theoretical physicist, not an engineer. Sheldon called engineers; oompa-loompas. Unless you work in an engineering firm without an R&D department, I am pretty sure you have run into a "Sheldon".  The actor Jim Parsons, performs a satire of the uber-nerd to create the Sheldon Character. It is because it is a satire that the situations are so incredibly funny, because we have been really close to the same thing, so many times.

     

    But I digress... I am supposed to provide a Sheldon quote.  It comes from the exchange when he keeps saying AFK while on-line gaming, and Penny asks "what does AFK mean", his reply is "away from keyboard", and Penny says "oh I see". Sheldon asks "what does that mean".

     

    Brilliant use of the "who's on first" joke.

  • I'll have to answer "none of the above".  Most engineers I've met aren't anything like Sheldon Cooper based on those quotes.  I think it's the constant reality of Murphy's Law that keeps them humble and in doubt.  I've never seen The Big Bang Theory, so I looked up Sheldon Cooper at Wikipedia and discovered he's based on a computer programmer known to one of the show's creators.  Now that makes sense -- I have met any number of computer scientists who are like that.

     

    There's a great scene in the movie War Games (1983) when the young hero (Matthew Broderick) goes to the local university's computer science lab to learn hacking techniques.  He meets two graduate students, Jim Sting and Malvin AKA "Mr. Potato Head".  Jim Sting is overweight and laconic.  Malvin is an über-nerd with black-rimmed glasses, white short-sleeved dress shirt, and pocket protector.  He's played by the always-annoying Eddie Deezen.

     

    After Malvin does something particularly obnoxious, Jim Sting says:

    Remember you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? Remember that? You're doing it right now.

    I don't think I'm going to watch The Big Bang Theory.  I've had to deal with too many Sheldon Coopers in real life.