Before I leave tomorrow to my grandma's house and lose my Internet access, I'm leaving you with this e-mail I got yesterday, translated from Spanish, in a hope that you can understand how hard it is to be an engineer.

Be seeing ya. whee

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1.- Coffee, cigarettes, Coke and Red Bull stop being luxuries and become first-need products; normal sleep, on the other hand, becomes a luxury that few people can fford.
2.- Instead of saying "Hi!", you say "Now what?".
3.- When someone says "Hi, how are you?", you answer with "Awful, and you?",
4.- Weekend is like the Shabbath: two days meant strictly for peaceful rest.
5.- You've slept more than 20 hours in a row on weekend.
6.- Sunday is the only day in the week when you do feel lucid, after sleeing your 20 hours.
7.- Even worse, you secretly diss your friends for forcing you out of your house on Friday and Saturday nights for some drinks.
8.- When that happens, you say "aw, what the hell" and drink some Red Bull to stay up during the whole night, because you love your sacred booze so much.
9.- You've tasted all sorts of liquors, and you're even a connoisseur who knows which ones are cheap and good.
10.- You absolutely refuse to drink moonshine, claiming it tastes like brake fluid mixed with ethyl alcohol.
11.- Or, on the other hand, you don't give a s**t if you have no money and get drunk with moonshine.
12.- You know how it feels like to get drunk on working days and arriving to your 7:00 AM class while still drunk.
13.- You can down on an entire glass of rum, whiskey or tequila, without even feeling the burning pain of alcohol running through your throat.
14.- You've ended up an inert lump of flesh in a back seat quite a bit of times.
15.- You have a beer bong.
16.- You can discuss, with solid foundations based on the truth, about the caffeine content of different energy drinks.
17.- You know where you can get energy drinks for less than $2.
18.- You've plotted quite a bit of schemes to raid the cafeteria in the midnight.
19.- You've fallen asleep in the toilet.
20.- You can look at someone in the eyes and nod your head without even hearing a single word.
21.- You've mowed through three DVDs full of MP3s in a single week while at work.
22.- Your eyes have bags by default.
23.- You wear shades by default.
24.- You've spent so much time in front of your computer, you have to wear glasses.
25.- Everybody knows they can't invite you anywhere during the last few class weeks.
26.- You've been through the "End of Semester Harshness" and still it's getting harsher and harsher.
27.- You find it normal to skip your filler subjects and every single meal while doing your RLC circuits homework.
28.- You've brushed your teeth and washed your hair in the restrooms.
29.- You always carry in your car a pillow, a sleeping bag, a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, a comb, and a bottle of Bawls.
30.- You find it perfectly normal to fall asleep in the lab.
31.- You find it strange when people from other majors are staring at you when you calmly and unflinchingly tell them you're staying all night long at college.
32.- You've discovered the benefits of shaving your head bald.
33.- You have a little coffee machine in your room so you can make your own coffee as soon as you wake up and while at work.
34.- You've brought that coffee machine to school.
35.- You feel like ristretto tastes like espresso, espresso tastes like normal coffee, and normal coffee tastes like water.
36.- Your body has grown tolerant to caffeine.
37.- You don't find it strange to drink 5 cups of coffee every day.
38.- You think those who are in another major are just fooling around.
39.- You've always wondered what those who are in business or marketing do for homework; maybe they just copy their homeworks from the Interwebs.
40.- Those from other majors have absolutely no idea of how it's like to do a homework that, apart from being well done, works.
41.- Those who are in architecture or design do understand when you tell them you've spent the entire night building an AM transmitter.
42.- If you're in electronics, you believe everyone else are a bunch of idiots who know nothing about math, circuits, electricity and magnetism, and you laugh at them when they must take their two mandatory digital electronics subjects.
43.- If you're a computer engineer, you think the people from electronics know nothing about computers, and you laugh at them when they're yelling at their microcontrollers while you just finished your Huffmann compressor.
44.- If you're in telecommunications, you think everyone else is stressing too much about their classes and that you have an easy, light time at your own subjects... until you start taking the telecommunications subjects.
45.- You're taking constitutional law as a filler class thinking it's the lightest stuff in the world, until the teacher makes you learn by heart the entire Constitution.
46.- After passing high school without giving a flying ******** about school, you're massively surprised when you find out that nerds not only are not treated as social outcasts, but even as Greek gods!
47.- You get all pissed when someone who doesn't knows anything about your homeworks tell you "do it later!", "ask someone else for it!", or even worse, "don't do it!".
48.- You hate those who say "I wanted to be a computer engineer so I can know something about computers" in such a carefree tone, without a ******** clue on all the massive hard work it takes to carry on with such a major.
49.- You also hate those who say "I wanted to be a computer engineer but I know nothing about computers".
50.- But you absolutely loathe those who say "I rule so hard at computers, I'm an l337 h4xX0r!" without even knowing a s**t about programming; when that happens, you ask them what's mutual exclusion between simultaneous processes and its solution with semaphore arrays.
51.- When someone calls you a "lazy a**", you feel a wrath burning deep within your soul, which will only extinguish once you feel that guy's innards against your skin and his blood dripping over your body.
52.- You have feelings of inferiority when you see the guys from marketing working their asses off for $1000 each month, while you work your a** off for a lame-a** A in the system.
53.- You lose your home keys and you don't notice until the next week.
54.- When someone doesn't works you insult it, you insult its family tree, or you put your hands above it and chant "Jo karjalan kunailla lehtii puu, jo karjalan koivikot tuuhettuu, käki kukkuu siellä ja kevät on, vie sinne mun kaijoni pohjäätton..."
55.- For the first time, ever since you left puberty, you take off these contact lenses and put on your old "bottle bottoms", because you don't even have the time to clean them and that makes your eyes burn.
56.- You know exactly when they refill the snacks machine.
57.- You know the best working environment is at the lab, with pizza, chips, soda and Red Bull, with music on your laptop's speakers, surrounded by everyone from your major, doing the practice between everyone.
58.- You feel like a loser for not having a spankin' laptop with wireless internet.
59.- You know quite a bit of people who have built their own computers.
60.- You feel a burning desire of slamming Linux inside your computer and leaving Windows behind forever.
61.- You don't do this because your mom, who can barely open MS Word, somehow manages to use your computer.
62.- Or, on the other hand, you have Linux in your computer, and I'm talking about Gentoo or Debian!
63.- The markings on your bed stand for how much times you've formatted your hard drive.
64.- Your computer detects 5 hard drives even though you just have one.
65.- You carry your thumb drives everywhere, and when someone calls you a geek for that, you fix that by slamming in a bottle opener and claiming you must be ready for any incoming beer.
66.- Your hard drive is about to explode due to all the bullshit you download: movies, series, games, music...
67.- You're absolutely convinced that Micro$oft is an evil empire and that Linux is Lord's own operating system.
68.- You still want to work for Microsoft.
69.- Everybody calls you a geek but you tell them they're a bunch of snobby jerks. After all, who can't crack a laugh at Sakaki from Azumanga Daioh getting bitten all the time by that psychopathic black kitty?
70.- You can talk with the people from your major abouy ANYTHING, whether it's mundane stuff like football, rock or movies, or arcane stuff like sci-fi, indie movies, manga and anime, or death metal.
71.- You can play the Hare Hare Yukai on your laptop's speakers and nobody will tell you anything.
72.- You have a geeky thing in your room, stuff like Robert Jordan's bibliography, Star Wars figures, anime posters...
73.- You know perfectly that a computer's power depends on how big is your bank account, never on how geeky you are.
74.- You know how to peek into other people's scores.
75.- You've danced to rhythm-less music, with your own dance steps, at 3:00 AM, without a single drop of booze in your blood, anything to make your stay in the lab more enjoyable.
76.- When your practice finally works, you scream at the top of your lungs "I'M THE KING OF THE WORLD!!!"
77.- You find out that the lab's chairs make for comfortable beds, but the desks give you a better support for your back.
78.- You crank out your papers one day before turning them in, even if they must be at least 10 pages long.
79.- Either your grammar and spelling suck so hard they make you look like a 3rd grade kid, or they rule so much they make you look like a Nobel prize.
80.- You merge breakfast, lunch and dinner into a huge single meal.
81.- You know a computer scientist is a real computer scientist until he spends a night at the lab.
82.- You think the labs need a coffee machine, an alarm clock that beeps at 7:00 AM, and a couple of bunk beds.
83.- You never had the time to decide between Bush or Kerry, and your position was abstentionist because you didn't even knew it was election day.
84.- You think of vacations as sleep, rest and hibernate.
85.- When your dad makes you get up on vacations and tell you they're meant to work on your own projects, you answer with "You'll never understand what I'm going through!".
86.- You're capable of taking your teachers to a strip club, as long as they spare you from flunking.
87.- You find out you can cuss while talking with your teachers.
88.- You keep coming out with some lame-a** excuse for why you didn't turned in time your filler homeworks.
89.- Your nightmare are about not giving your homework in time.
90.- You're wondering why is there so much people at school during the day.
91.- You don't feel afraid of staying at school overnight, no matter how much stories about ghosts are told.
92.- You can survive without human contact, food or sunlight... but when the power goes out or when your computer dies, DISASTER!
93.- You have a strange voodoo skill to make any everyday computer application work, no matter if it's Word, Excel, Photoshop, Solidworks, MS Access or any version of Linux... but your own BBS server, crafted with your own hands, will never work no matter what.
94.- You make a disgusted face when they lend you a computer with Windows Vista.
95.- The best car is any car that can carry all the stuff you use to stay asleep at schoool.
96.- You make some really, really lame programs and systems that will never be useful in real life, and you're 100% damn proud about that.
97.- You have the mark of our modern times: a hardening at the bottom of your hand, after using the mouse for so long.
98.- Everybody wants you to "fix their computer", claiming "they don't know what they did but it won't work anymore", and it turns out to be just a little virus or spyware.
99.- You especially loathe the "don't know what I did" part. Can't you just ******** pay attention?
100.- You can understand an arcane dialect made of a strange mixture of acronyms, cuss words, and big scientific words. Example: "Alright, the SIPO on that ******** UART doesn't works. There are four possibilities: the transceiver I have in that protoboard is roasted and will yield pure bullshit, or the CPLD is ********, or the HyperTerminal is not properly configured, or the computer's RS-232 port doesn't works, or Quartus has no ******** clue on how to do the analysis and synthesis process when I compile that s**t".
101.- You use these words in your everyday speech.
102.- You understand every single engineering joke and you also agree in that they're so ******** lame.
103.- You're surprised when the management students must use linear algebra to solve some problems, because you always thought they just add and substract.
104.- You've had nightmares involving the Fourier tranform.
105.- You use the word "convolution" instead of "complication" and not because you want to sound pedantic.
106.- You find it normal to fill pages and pages with math scribbles.
107.- Your computer has no more room for any more programs: you already have Borland C++, Cygwin, Dev-C++, Microsoft Visual Studio 6, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Freescale CodeWarrior, Altera Quartus II, ModelSim, OrCAD, Prolog, Ubuntu Linux...
108.- You can use all these programs.
109.- All of them are pirated or cracked.
110.- You do your homework at the public computers area and the finances students look at you, saying "what the ******** is this guy doing with these codes?".
111.- You diss anyone who dares telling you to copy some code from the Internets, it could not work or you may never understand how that code works.
112.- You've learned languages like C, C++, Visual BASIC, SQL, Java, VHDL, Assembly, MATLAB, JavaScript or PHP, yet you can't even speak Spanish even if you live in Los Angeles or Miami.
113.- while (1==1)
{ printf("Are you tired? (yes, a lot, any other answer)n> ");
scanf("%s", &Answer);
if (strcmp(Answer, "yes"))
{ drinkRedBull(1); }
else if (strcmp(Answer, "a lot"))
{ drinkRedBull(3); }
else
{ printf("Well, start working now, you lazy a**!n"); }
114.- You don't find it hard to use a computer with a command line interface, without a mouse, windows, icons, none of that pizzazz.
115.- You know a CPLD can work with a laptop charger.
116.- You know what's the "engineer's frustration": a mental state caused by not being able to solve a problem no matter how hard you try. Symptoms: severe tension in the muscles around the neck, feeling of mental blockage, and severe cussing.
117.- You can play the Godfather theme with a wave generator.
118.- You use your toolbox as a pencil holder and now you must fumble among your multimeter, your logic tester, your soldering iron and your microcontroller to find them.
119.- You have the bizarre skill of being able to sleep in any kind of support, whether it's pencils, keyboards, backpacks...
120.- You've been in college at dawn, yet you've never seen one.
121.- Teamwork: the lazy asses team up with the nerds, the nerds do everything, and the lazy asses must try not to be discovered.
122.- If something mysteriously stops working, you blame a burned TTL/OPAMP and tell your teacher you don't have the time to see what the ******** is wrong.
123.- Your dogs starts barking at you and can't recognize you anymore, because you've been living at school for several months.
124.- Your little brother is born, and your reaction is "huh? my mom was pregnant?".
125.- When they ask about your age, you tell the real one instead of "how much do I look like?", because these bags under your eyes always give you 2-3 extra years.
126.- Your home is like a hotel: you just drop by to have a bite and sleep.
127.- You know how dangerous it is to drive from school to home while sleepy.
128.- You've read all this and you think your life is strangely familiar. Maybe a medium wrote it...