A Quartet of Trumpeter Swans

Up in the air, Junior Birdman,
Flying so high off the ground,
Is it a bird, plane or Superman?
No! It’s Junior Birdman upside down.

The Junior Birdmen of America was an organization founded in 1934 for children interested in building model airplanes. It was promoted by the Hearst newspapers, with the cooperation of the U.S. Bureau of Air Commerce. After that intro, let’s get on with the rest of this aeronautical themed post, the germ of which originated with the following message that our friend DJ shared on Facebook yesterday, Arguing with an engineer is a lot like wrestling in the mud with a pig, after a couple of hours you realize the pig likes it. While, this may not be true of every engineer, it is certainly true for enough of them, to be true in my book. We call that an engineering approximation. I ought to know all this, because I’m an engineer and I work with other engineers and have done so for many years. At the paper airplane factory today, I was called into the conference room for a meeting. The wife of one of our younger team members had just had their first child and this was his first day back at work. Most of the team had already gathered to present him with a card and a little cash. I walked into the conference room in-between after most of the other engineers had already gathered and before the guest of honor had arrived. Sensing a captive audience, I announced that I had a joke to tell. This pronouncement was met with general groans all around. I guess that I must be telling too many bad jokes at work. Undeterred, I launched in to the one liner and I was rewarded with much louder laughter than the preceding groans, all of which came from my fellow engineers.