Noting Cultural Assumptions

In this weeks blog post I looked for a portrayal of my job in popular culture. I am looking to be a chemical engineer, but trying to find specifically chemical engineering in popular culture was a little difficult. So I went in the route of looking at engineers in general. For my popular culture portrayal, I chose a youtube video about Dilbert. The video describes the curse that engineers get called the "Knack". Dilbert is the engineer and he explains to his dog what it means to how he got the "Knack" as an engineer.

The cultural assumptions that are portrayed in the video is that all engineers like to take apart machines and put them back together to make them work. The video shows how engineers are always looking for ways to make things work a lot easier for them. Also the assumption is that all engineers are smart and are able to figure out how to fix a broken machine right away. The video shows how Dilbert as a young boy is able to fix a machine while he is at the doctors office, but no one else is able fix. Popular culture views engineers job as jobs that cause people to be disconnected with the normal world. The "curse of the engineer" as Dilbert puts it is that engineers can not live a normal life like other people do. Popular culture makes engineers look like all they really do is work in labs or do there own thing and never really interact with people. Many cultural assumptions are portrayed in popular culture are totally differently from how people actually act and do their jobs in the real world. Engineers do have tough jobs, but popular culture at times seems to stretch the idea "that engineers can not live a normal life like others" too much.