On Engineers, Tight Coupling, and Time

Today is our wedding anniversary. Last year I wrote about meeting my engineer hubby. This year, I'd like to say a few words about being married to an engineer. I highly recommend it! There are many advantages:

• Your anniversary present might be a strange electronic device, such as the Time Machine shown in the picture above. This creation of my husband's even sort of worked! Well at least it flashed the light bulbs.
  
• The engineer's motto is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Your engineer spouse will stick around if the marriage is working.
  
• The marriage works as long as you let your spouse spend hours tinkering with gadgets and you initiate the occasional physical-layer test to see if all components are still functional.
  
• When you're married to an engineer, new toys arrive frequently, including iBooks, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and other iFads.
  
• You will have a cool home-entertainment system.
  
• Said cool home-entertainment system will even work some of the time and you will get much entertainment from comparing its design to a Rube Goldberg sculpture.
  
• Engineers can cook! My husband is a gourmet cook.
  
• Dinner is always on time. (Don't expect to get away with saying you are too busy playing with a new iPad to come to dinner.)
  
• Dinner-table talk can range from IPv6 to the odds of there being extraterrestrial civilizations to how DNA transcription works.
  
• Engineers make lots of money and invest it well, despite many expenditures for gadgets and fixes for the Rube-Goldberg-like home-entertainment system.
  
• An engineer will figure out how your body works and enjoy its many features.
  
• If you marry an engineer, he or she may really get a time machine working at some point. This is a good thing because you will want to spend lots of time with your engineer spouse.
  
• Given time, you will realize you wouldn't wear the jewelry that a non-engineer would give as an anniversary present anyway. It gets in the way of typing on your computer keyboard. :-)