There are vanishingly few times in life where the perfect levels of comedy and tragedy come into harmony, and even fewer of those moments occur when we are actually in attendance. And so today, let us recount one of those stories.
It all began in my second full semester of being in the upper-level of my civil engineering program during the fall of 2016. Everything was going well. I was a few semesters ahead of the typical track, breezing my way through the coursework, and was relieved to find that there wasn’t much of a corresponding spike in course difficulty, though I was a bit peeved: the additional five hundred dollars per class on top of the base tuition seemed steep for essentially renting out a room for six people at the university that had slashed the same program nearly a decade before (apparently, there isn’t much research money in civil engineering, and everybody’s eager to “get their bag” these days). My course load was a healthy mix of the last prerequisites slapped in between early program courses: some days fluid mechanics, other days statistics. There are horror stories about undergraduates taking particular engineering classes and finding them to be utterly miserable; thermodynamics is a classic, controls and signal processing for the electric engineers, so on and so forth. The realm of civil engineering, though, tends to evade those sorts of real brain busters, and unfortunately, as a result, of all the possible engineering students, it has gained the reputation for scraping a little too close to the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps it is the close associations with dirt or public services, or the fact that buildings have been around for thousands of years and so they’ve lost their luster. Whatever the reason may be, I hadn’t encountered that sort of person yet.
It wasn’t until I was taking a fairly basic class, introduction to computer science, that I discovered the first inklings of the unfortunate soul of our tale. I was naïve, but genuine, believing for whatever reason that each person that had made it that far into the program had deserved to be there. I had already lost a friend to the sieve that sorts men’s fates, so it hadn’t occurred me that someone could get nearly all the way to the end their degree program and fundamentally understand nothing. Now our little character who I will affectionately refer to as the Ant was in this class with me, along with a few other students, including his “queen”. I will enlighten you to that moment in due time. See, while in this class, I could already glean the beginnings of the cogless machinations turning in his mind; many times it seemed as though he were doing his best to convince everyone he knew perfectly well what he was doing, all the while having a sort of blank stare and eventual mocking response to simple questions. Anyone with any sort of working experience has run into this sort of person; it never takes very long to find out just how delusional people are their perceived abilities.
I will preface this by briefly mentioning another story. When I was much younger, I had no fear of helping anyone. I hadn’t yet been bitten by the brazen stupidity of others. I took many people at their word, even though others might not have, solely because I couldn’t see the harm in it. In fact, while traveling on the Metrolink to visit the university for the first time, while in the company of a few others moving into the upper-level program, I was approached by a man and a woman, both somewhat dilapidated, perhaps a little tired and delirious, asking if I would lend them my phone to call someone. Everyone in the group gave me a strange look, expecting me to decline, but I let them use it; we were all locked in a cab until the next stop, where could they go? Almost certainly a drug deal was facilitated. I only considered it after seeing strange scabs on the arms of both people and the wide-eyed glances the woman would send my way as I watched in wait.
I’ve digressed, but with purpose. Some weeks into the programming class, we were tasked with writing the code for the game rock, paper, scissors. He asked me if I could show him my code in order to see how I made things run. At some level, I assumed he had already gotten everything off the internet, through Chegg or some equivalent, so thinking nothing of it, I copied the code in its entirety and sent it to him. And a week or so later, I found that I received a zero for the assignment. Naturally I took a casual stroll to the professor during office hours, meeting them for the first time (as it was an online class) and asked why I received a zero if I sent her functional code.
“Well, you see,” she began, pulling up the assignment, “I’m concerned you may have stolen this off the internet, because you and one of your classmate’s submissions looks identical. Only the output was different, which is very odd.”
For a moment, there was a bit of panic in me. Honestly, I’d even forgotten that it was lent out to the Ant. She had pulled up both assignments side by side and I could barely make out what he had changed: “Gadzooks! Paper covers rock!” Somehow the idea of lifting my code entirely already seemed fairly egregious, and essentially only changing the few words that had absolutely no bearing on the functionality of the code seemed to be an utterly baffling decision to make. After sitting for a few seconds, and I must have looked terribly confused, I explained the situation, emphasizing that the code was given to the other student only to compare their code with mine. “I’ll write it all over, by hand, right now, if I need to do that to prove I wrote this.” I would have no doubt made some error, but she reassured me that it wasn’t necessary and that things would be handled. But the Ant continued to burrow, scuttling about those halls, passing through little gaps, leaving an empire of dirt in his wake.
So why the “Ant”? Well roughly a year later, a semester before graduation, it was beginning to get rather frigid in late October. That day the sun was setting on the campus, with the last little rays of light still poking over the ornate tops of the buildings, sometimes intersecting with cloudy breaths. Being as we were part of a joint program with a much more prestigious university, we were always out of place in some regard, like serfs among noblemen. All the classes were taught by working professionals, taking place after five in the evening, and so we had to be quick in finishing our surveying before the light would die. The Ant was partnered with one of our classmates, Vanessa. She was a rather short and plump young woman, well rounded, somewhat good looking, and our Ant was absolutely enamored with her. He tended to hover around her, somehow never raising too much suspicion, seeing as the availability of women in engineering tends towards zero. As fate would align, there was a moment where, off in the distance, as she held the tool to measure her station’s elevation, he was looking through the transit, and the perfect amount of light hit her from behind, enveloping her in a sort of angelic glow. He looked up from the tool, fixated and entranced. It may have just been my imagination that I even saw these specific words, but I could see him expel a deep breath from within, as if his spirit was snatched right out of him, and I swore saw him mouth the words “my queen”. I swear I even saw a tears well up in his eyes as well, visible only due to the illumination of the sun. He saw me staring and became incensed. I returned a thumbs up to him. That moment may have been rather endearing if it were any other person, but anytime after that day, when I looked at him (and it didn’t help that his hair was black and he tended to wear very dark colored clothing), I couldn’t help but think of an ant.
I suppose that is enough of an introduction for him, or at least a sizable sampling for understanding of the sort of man that he was. So if it wasn’t any of those days, when did the unity of luck, fate, and idiocy collide?
It was the final semester of university, with only the capstone and a few other classes left before graduation. The campus was lively again; the heat had finally returned to the land and everyone was preparing in their own special way for graduation. A few of us had internships that were likely to turn into jobs post-graduation, and some of us had even taken the first steps to licensure to officially become state assets. About a month or so into the structural capstone course, we were expected to be finishing up the first portion of our floor design, which was a simple layout. Perhaps it sounds daunting to the uninitiated, but I suggest this analogy: imagine being asked to do a form of math problem that you’d done a hundred times by now. Now do a few slight variations on it, maybe putting an exponent, or combining concepts; yes, it can be tricky; but it’s still something known and something within reason.
Now I had finished the design for my group about two weeks before and spent most of the class messing around, either making new spreadsheets to do the next bit of work quicker or just playing games to pass the time. All of my professors were aware that I wasn’t looking to be rude when I played games; I was simply bored. Making my way into the classroom—which was essentially a computer lab with a white board—before the professor arrived, I saw the Ant and his group (who, for the record, had an unlicensed “engineer” in their group from a local firm that will remain unnamed) discussing how to check certain conditions. He kept going on and on about how “This condition isn’t even in the freaking manual! How are we supposed to calculate this?!” Unable to restrain my interest, trying to think about what possible condition their floor plan had for him to be so irate, I strolled over. To my surprise, it was a very simple, common condition: just three point loads, spread equally along the beam. It was in this moment that I finally understood how fundamentally unsound his engineering in general was. I figured he was just over confident in his abilities before. Unfortunately for him, he may have just been a little light in the head for having such a thick skull.
At some point he noticed me hovering around and asked me outright, “Well, how would you add the loads together?” as if to imply I had some hidden knowledge. He began by explaining to me that there is a single point load case and a two point load case in the steel manual, but not three, and complained how the makers of the manual shouldn’t be so lazy or forgetful, and that it seemed just as common as any other condition. When I told him, while true, there wasn’t a single condition, it was actually a combination of two conditions. He returned a sort of blank stare to me, trying to compute something behind his eyes.
“Well, how can that be right?”
“It’s super position; if you have two events occurring at the same time, you can add the separate events together to get the resultant. That’s like physics 101 or something.”
“But that doesn’t sound right at all.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“It’s a very difficult thing to say why a man lies.”
I took a moment to respond.
“Well, all loads get to the ground somehow. I believe in you though.”
And I walked away.
I could tell he thought his delivery about lies was some incredible line, but in thinking about it now, he probably stole it from someone. Considering his “queen” was by his side, I assumed he was doing his best to save face and not look like an idiot around her, but all that was running through my mind was a conversation with him the fall semester before, how he had “designed bridges” and “was in charge of a large project”, when, in fact, he was an inspector, an intern at that, and was simply making sure that they were putting the correct members in the right place, which have a number written on the side of them that correspond with a set of drawings, like a grown man’s Lego set. I didn’t mention that his beam spacing was entirely wrong (which we had gone over deck spans and how to determine beam spacing the previous class), but that is beside the point.
The professor finally entered the class, fashionably late as usual. He was an older Iranian man, somewhat flubby, with thick glasses, a balding head, and a genuine smile. He was a veteran in the field, being the president of his own firm with, at a minimum, something like forty years of experience in designing all sorts of structures in countless different conditions. He had absolutely no tolerance for idiocy. As a side note, I would like to mention a brief side bar story about him, the professor, just to show how much more reserved he had become in his old age. After hearing stories from former students and coworkers about his classes and professional dealings from decades ago, I can’t help but share it. Back in the early aughts, he was a professor for the university, he taught a number of other classes before teaching the capstone course. He was going over the concept of tension only members and how some materials or configurations can only properly transfer load in one direction, and how that could be useful in application. A student began to argue with him about how a string could, theoretically, be loaded in compression. The professor, never backing down from a challenge, invited the student to test his theory. He told the student to hold the string that he brought for the demonstration up to his forehead as he would “load it in compression”. He then, quickly, smacked the forehead of the student and asked him, “Now, can the string take compression?” When he was met with a yes, he was absolutely befuddled, but in response, propositioned the student to try again, being met with the same result and a redder forehead. When asked, “Now, is the string able to take compression?”, the student responded with a no, and the rest of the class learned to respect his words from that day forward.
So imagine the surprise to the professor when, on the day that the floor designs were due, the Ant would come to him in such a bold manner and ask him how to calculate design loads for that condition. The Ant tried to explain to him, the same as he did to me, about the manual, and how maybe, if he could do the math correctly, he could get “close” to the answer. “Engineering is all about approximations anyway”. He said it all so confidently. His group stood by in the wings. What followed was a thorough dismantling of the man’s entire past five years of education, and potentially his life.
“I don’t know where you learned any of your statics, or who taught you, or how you have gotten this far, but you shouldn’t be here. But you are, which is unfortunate, and so you will have to learn very very much to finish this course before you are let out into the real world. Most of this is... elementary, day one statics—maybe you should ask for a refund from your statics teacher, ah ha ha! Why did you not ask some of the other students how to do these basic problems? Did you not consult your group at all? These are things that are learned years ago! It’s a miracle and a travesty that you have gotten this far without learning them. Bring it back next week with the work done correctly.”
There was a solemn disappointment on his face the whole time, as if he were staring in an abyss, slowly realizing that this man, our Ant, was a potential member of the next generation of engineers, and among the next generation there were potentially innumerable others just like him. It felt like a real-life rendition of the scene from Billy Madison, during Billy’s magnum opus speech and the subsequent verbal assault; only there was no one on the Ant’s side, and only he was dumber for trying to explain himself, and I don’t think he got the girl. And if I remember correctly, the next week when we brought the revised work in, he still did it wrong.
But there’s something tragic in the whole sequence of events. If you were to ask if our little Ant should have ever got this far, I would say it was already too late: by the time he had tunneled into the upper-level program before me, somehow no one had noticed or pointed out to him that his knowledge of anything related to the field was all superficial, incomplete, full of assumptions and shortcuts that were good enough to pass a class, but lacked any understanding. I don’t say it as a judgment; he simply seemed to lacked any form of self-reflection or reflection on the material as a whole. He would posit questions to classmates and then doubt the validity of answers given. It was clear that he knew some things, but at the level of rote memorization, where if he were asked second order consequences of first principal applications, he may not even understand what that question was getting at unless explained at the level you might present a layman with. Which is fine in some fields; not every patent clerk is meant to be Einstein.
In thinking about it, if anything, I consider this all of this more of an indictment on the American education system as whole, and the cowardice we have accumulated from bottom to top: in an evergreen state, attempting to modernize and revolutionize, truly embracing that no child be left behind, the educational system could only learn the lesson of falling into delusions by dragging the bodies to victory. I don’t wish to deride people who can’t do higher level work; but it’s the same as bringing a small child to a restaurant (and I know the analogy makes them to be the child, but stop looking at the trees and see the forest) and asking them to sit quietly for hours as everyone else enjoys themselves; you’ve set them up for failure to become bitter and resentment of the world at large, particularly if they make it to the end and realize they’ve been swindled. Too eager to sell the idea, and certainly seeing how easy it is to reap the interest, sometime long, long ago, the seed had already been propagated that everyone can get an education, and that somehow morphed into the idea that everyone should get a higher, and higher, and higher education, as being educated could never be detrimental, pushed from a very young age. They gave us the cake, but never mentioned that too much would rot our teeth. “It will make you stand out on you resume!” I recall the constant bashing of trades and other sorts of blue collar work, even in high school, constantly portrayed as lowly and beneath people of higher abilities. I cannot tell you how many times I heard “it’s a waste of my abilities to not go to school”, but was lucky enough to make it out unscathed. Now this is in no way condemning education, or saying it is wholly bad; it is merely sanctioned brainwashing for many people; but the goal of education before seemed to be aimed towards some idea of great truth, veritas, the search of it and the pursuit of its proper uses. But somewhere we became lost, forgetting to attend to a greater truth, aletheia: that we may be truthful to ourselves, in our own abilities, unashamed of our shortcomings. I’ve rambled too much as it is. If only it weren’t so easy these days to live in our insulated lies.
This was originally written as a short story from the perspective of the Ant himself. If you want to check that out (it’s written as a cartoonishly evil voice; think Poindexter from Dexter’s Laboratory), then click out here.