I love you, deux!

Back to that. Part deux in the saga of why I was a brainy math geek, but couldn't remember my locker combination...

When we left off I had garnered myself a "real" engineering job. One in which I couldn't just trot around in tight jeans and dig trenches while shooting the shit with other 20-somethings that were pretending to be scientists. This job was about making computer chips, and my position was in the plasma etch group. Yeah, fer real. I was in charge of several pieces of equipment that did bizarre things with strange gasses and were critical steps in making computer chips that made money for the company. The bottom line: my shit better work or I would be publicly ridiculed by our 4'10" cigarrette-stinkin Napolean engineering manager. And for the most part it did, but on occasion I would be called into his den to regale him with the finer points of SC1 clean vs an ozonated water single-wafer clean process, and being a good engineer I'd fill him in on the details. Details that were completely made up. Because I can't remember numbers for shit. But I was getting good at pretending and looking very confident, so Mr.Napolean relied on my "knowledge" in a critical and specific area of the process. I went home at night happy because Mr.Napolean was a dickhead, and I had gained a small position of power over him because I knew something he didn't know. Or more accurately, I didn't know something that he didn't know. And it happened again and again. My boss would ask me for the results of a test I'd done a thousand times, and I'd pretend to rattle of the results and call it good. A coworker would ask me what something or other specification was that I should know better than my phone number and I'd make up a number that seemed reasonable and call it good. I bluffed my way through meetings with heads of departments and angry bosses. I shimmied and jangled if I was asked directly for hard numbers. The longer I worked the better I pretended.

Now is where you're expecting the part of the story where I faked something and there was a disaster and the factory imploded and people died, right? Well, it'd be cliche, but far more interesting than reality. The reality was I kept getting promoted and nice raises. Which all gave me a false sense of confidence in my abilities as an engineer. I was a decent engineer, but if I learned anything at all in those six years, it was how to act like I knew what I was doing. I was the freakin Sir Lawrence Olivier of the clean room.

Many many years ago I was interviewed for a job right out of college and the idiot behind the enormous desk asked me, "So you went to such a fancy school, does that mean you think you're smarter than everyone else?" After a bried stunned silence, I put my eyeballs back in my head and said, "Well, no, but I do think I learn faster than other people. Put me in any situation and I will adapt very quickly." So now, when people assume that I'm brilliant because I was an engineer, I laugh and say, "No, not brilliant. But really good at pretending to be." I'm a fake, and proud of it.