Maggie's Farm

My parents had a book of old cartoons and comics that dated from around the beginning of the 1900s. One that stuck in my mind was that of a a wife talking to her husband: "Here I am, stuck over a hot stove all day, and you get to work in a nice cool sewer."

Re women in male-dominated jobs. I knew a woman who was the offspring of a TX oilman and a Palestinian. When her father died when she was 19, she put aside her petroleum engineering studies and went to work in the West TX oilfields to support her mother and siblings, at a time when political correctness was long ago and far away from the Permian Basin. She was tough and bright, and rose in the ranks to supervise a small work crew. On one wellsite one of the workers she supervised was a prisoner on a work release program. When the prisoner on work release got a little fresh with his supervisor, she proceeded to use a wrench to whack the prisoner upside the head.

When the toolpusher (foreman for the entire rig work crew) asked the prisoner how he had received the big wound on his head, the prisoner replied that he had slipped and fallen down. The woman went back to school and finished her engineering degree.

Neither all women nor all men are competent at what they do. I was on a well site where an inexperienced woman whom I did not supervise had turned off a piece of equipment when the rig was down for several hours, not realizing that it is less strain to keep it moving than to restart it. When she disconnected the apparatus, sparks flew, and the gas-laden fluid coming up from the bottom of the well got on fire. I tried using a hose on the fire, and fortunately it went out.

The odds of an EE taking on a civil engineering type project are minimal. Because Professional Engineers know that they put their licenses on the line every time they sign on to do a project, they are VERY careful to take on work appropriate to their expertise.

I found that out when I was looking for a PE to do an inspection on a shoddy construction job. While this was definitely a job for a PE with a civil engineering degree, most of the PEs with civil engineering degrees I contacted declined to take on the job, because the particular job was outside their expertise. However, those who declined the job were quite helpful in referring me to PEs who did have that expertise. The engineer I selected came from such a "I don't do that but here is someone who will" type of referral. The engineer's court testimony several years later was also quite useful.