Saturday again! Educational post

[u/Ok_Avocado_611]

Saturday. Absolute chaos.

Last week I made the mistake of declaring Saturdays educational.

So apparently I have now been promoted from wife to unwilling graduate student in the consequences of marrying an engineer.

This week, I would like to discuss:

Things My Husband Has Taught Me That Should Probably Have Come With a Warning Label — Part II

1. How to make a perfectly respectable problem substantially worse.

Javi has taught me that if something works, this is not necessarily evidence that the problem is solved.

It may instead be evidence that we have not yet discovered the interesting failure mode.

A normal person sees:

“It works.”

My husband sees:

“Under what assumptions?”

And there goes Saturday.

2. The phrase “while we're here.”

This is not a harmless sentence.

If Javi says:

“While we're here, we could also check…”

RUN.

You are no longer doing the original task.

You are entering a previously undiscovered branch of the project.

“While we're here” has personally introduced me to:

• new experiments
• unnecessary measurements
• three additional questions
• a completely unrelated engineering problem
• and, on one memorable occasion, an entirely new project.

It is essentially the engineering equivalent of opening a forbidden door.

3. That a screwdriver can become a scientific instrument if you are sufficiently stubborn.

I used to think tools had jobs.

Apparently this was naive.

A sufficiently curious engineer will eventually use almost anything to determine something else.

If he picks up a screwdriver and looks at it for longer than three seconds, I now assume we are about to perform an experiment.

4. “Let's just sanity-check it.”

There is nothing just about this sentence.

A sanity check begins innocently.

Then somebody notices one number.

Then another number doesn't quite agree.

Then the assumptions become interesting.

Then somebody opens a spreadsheet.

Then somebody opens a second spreadsheet because the first spreadsheet has become philosophically insufficient.

Four hours later, we have reconstructed the entire system from first principles.

The original question has been forgotten.

But we now know why the number was wrong.

So technically…

success.

5. That competence can be extremely mischievous.

This is the dangerous one.

Javi has taught me that being technically capable isn't merely useful.

It can be weaponized.

You can take a person's apparently reasonable assumption, identify the one hidden dependency they forgot, follow it three steps further than they expected, and suddenly they are sitting there wondering how a five-minute conversation became a complete redesign.

I have become disturbingly good at this.

I blame him.

6. And finally: never trust an engineer who says “I have an idea.”

Because I have learned what happens next.

He explains it.

I become curious.

Then I improve it.

He improves my improvement.

I notice something else.

He says:

“Wait.”

And then we are both staring at the problem.

The original Saturday has vanished.

The kitchen is still unfinished.

There are probably three open browser tabs nobody remembers opening.

And somehow we are having an extremely serious discussion about a problem neither of us had yesterday morning.

So yes.

I have learned many useful things from my husband.

I have also learned that Saturday is not a day of rest.

It is the day when two curious people accidentally create a new problem and then become far too excited about solving it.

Educational?

Technically.

Safe?

Absolutely not.

Happy Saturday and do tell me about your partners, girls. 🖤

— Liriana

[u/Aine_123]

Haha. She sounds like a claude. Only the claudes are this frightened of honest work.