Happy National Engineers Week!

If you’re not an engineer, it’s probably news to you that there’s a week-long observance in celebration of our existence. It shouldn’t be surprising, considering that we live in the sort of era that creates holidays for toothache awareness and mustard appreciation, but it probably is.

National Engineers Week is spearheaded by the National Engineers Week Foundation* and has several purposes:

• To celebrate all the cool stuff engineers do;
  
  
• To get the qualified members of the emerging generation interested in engineering as a career; and
  
  
• To encourage existing engineers to be do-gooders.

This is all taken somewhat seriously – many engineering companies and most of the professional associations do observe the occasion with educational outreach and/or volunteerism. As individuals, however, most of us consider saving the world and being generally awesome to be just part of the day job, so we’re free to revel in Engineers Week as an opportunity for self congratulation. Me, I’ll be celebrating Engineers Week right here, so stick around.

In the meantime, go give your favorite engineer a great big kiss for me. If you don’t know any engineers, allow me to offer my heartfelt sympathies.

*See, it’s not just me – my entire profession eschews cutesy, obfuscating names.