Three Engineers, a Computer Scientist and a Broken Down Car

Title: Three Engineers, a Computer Scientist and a Broken Down Car

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal lore, joke
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Eric Hansen
  • Date Collected: 5-30-19

Informant Data:

  • Eric Hansen is a engineering professor at Dartmouth College. He teaches a number of classes at Dartmouth, including ENGS 23, Distributed Systems and Fields and ENGS 31, Digital Electronics. He grew up in California, and many members of his family and community were Scandinavian. His family has a tradition of storytelling, influenced by traditional tales such as the Icelandic Sagas.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: The joke is based on perceived differences between engineering fields and computer science. The engineers all attempt to identify the problem using technical knowledge relevant to their fields, while the computer scientist’s response is humorous because it uses a non-technical solution that is known to often work on computers. The narrative form of the joke is influenced by the storytelling culture of the informant’s family.
  • Social Context: This joke was recorded during an in-person interview with the informant. The informant was not sure where he had first heard this joke or when he would tell it, but it may have been told in a classroom setting.

Item:

Interview Recording:

Transcript of joke:

  • (6:26) “There’s three engineers and a computer scientist who are taking a ride down the road in a car and the car breaks down, and the…, uh, the mechanical engineer says, ‘well, you know, it’s, um, probably something in the drivetrain; we’re gonna have to take the…, drop the transmission out and figure out, you know, there’s probably some, you know, some broken gear or something and we gotta fix that,’ and the electrical engineer says, ‘nah, I think it’s probably in the ignition, you know, we’re gonna have to get in there and figure we’ve got a bad spark plug wire or something like that. We fix that and it could be right as rain and we’ll be back on the road. The chemical engineer says, ‘nah, no, I think it’s in the carburetion. Um, you know, that somehow the air-fuel mixture isn’t right and the fuel’s not getting where it needs to go and that’s undoubtedly the problem.’ And the computer scientist says, ‘we could just try all getting out and getting back in again.'”

Informant’s Comments:

  • This informant thought the joke had some literal truth to it, because turning things on and off again often ends up fixing problems.

Collector’s Comments:

  • From my perspective as someone who is studying both engineering and computer science, this joke seems to humorously portray how engineers usually rely on rigorous mathematical analysis of systems, while in computer science you sometimes have to just try things without understanding exactly how everything works underneath.

Collector’s Name: Ben Wolsieffer

Tags/Keywords:

  • Verbal Folklore
  • Joke
  • Comparison between fields

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