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<p>Is that an excuse to put off purchasing a new one, when the rest of the family needs one, for five years?</p>
<p>That was not so much an excuse as a comment on the quality of the programming. If the rest of the family wants a new TV, they are welcome to get one. They would have a hard time convincing me that they need one, however. Personally, I purchased our last TV after having done only a few hours of research because its predecessor was beyond repair.</p>
<p>Yesterday, I wrote several different posts and deleted them because I was afraid nobdy would get them. Since then, you’ve all written them for me! Including saving stuff, basements, packing material, manuals, and packing the car!</p>
<p>Packing the car is such a huge deal. We have a running joke that H has to download a program and pack the car virtually before he can even begin on the real thing.</p>
<p>And how about the ways he “helps around the house” when company is coming. Like, by cleaning up his shop in the basement or dismantelling and cleaning the grill. Meanwhile, the kids are going crazy, the house is a mess, and the oven is smoking. I’ll never forget the Christmas his parents were expected for dinner. House was still torn apart from Christmas morning, tots were fighting naps, and I had an entire dinner to prepare. H disappeared, and I found him changing the oil in the car! Why? We weren’t going anywhere!</p>
<p>As for throwing things out, I’ve been known to pack boxes, date them, hide them in the basement, and a year later, if he hasn’t missed anything, I drag it to Goodwill.</p>
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<p>My H says there are two types as well - the kind who read the manuals and the kind who “get a bigger hammer”. Obviously, he is the former.</p>
<p>I have to add that he is also the kind who reads the manuals and critiques them. “That’s stupid. Why’d they do it that way? This is so poorly written.” etc.</p>
<p>Just for fun, you wives and children of engineers, google “Asperger’s Syndrome”. There is a pretty darned good chance that your husband/father has Asperger’s. It will explain a lot.</p>
<p>Nope, doesn’t fit. It actually fits me a lot more, which is scary. 
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<p>The only thing that fits my H is the tendency to bore with long details, and a lot of knowledge about obscure things. But that knowledge comes about, in my opinion, due to his interest combined with a high intelligence. On CC we call it “passion.”</p>
<p>He’s also not incredibly social, but that has more to do with his impatience with small talk. But he doesn’t have any of the listed speech or language symptoms. He’s a pretty good listener. Doesn’t have any motor clumsiness. He doesn’t have any of that “sterotypical and repetitive motor behaviors [that] are a core of diagnosis.” </p>
<p>The hard part about diagnosing Aspergers is that so many of the symptoms are simply extremes of normal behavior. So somewhere there is a line that gets crossed. I know several folks who have been convinced their kid was Aspergers, had them evaluated, and they weren’t.</p>
<p>On the other hand, an engineers’ personality may well be a disease of some sort, for which I don’t think there is a cure. 
I’m curious – I think my H has gotten worse as he’s gotten older. Is this true for anyone else?</p>
<p>Engineer’s personality: I have found over the years that it can be modulated with very straightforward advice. “I like you to send me flowers occasionally for no reason” is one example of things I have said to my husband. Hinting has never worked, but a simple request has deep impact. </p>
<p>As for Asperger’s, we have several family members with Asperger’s on my side of the family (engineers and architects). There really is something a little “off” about them, it’s an extreme.</p>
<p>When my son was diagnosed wtih Asperger’s, the psychogist told us, “This is when I usually meet the father for the first time. And when the father hears the description of Asperger’s, he often says, ‘That sounds just like me.’ And he is usually an engineer or computer programmer.”</p>
<p>We engineers might be boring, but just like in work once we have found an optimum solution (e.g. wives) we tend to stick with it. We are too lazy to do further research on the subject.</p>
<p>Dad and 2 bros are engineers. Dad loses his mind if he doesn’t have a project… we grew up with the basement full of cans of nails, screws, nuts, bolts, tools, wood scraps, paint. The auto shop–with pit-- in the garage. Dad would pick dead TVs out of people’s garbage and try to fix them and usually had a dozen or so in the basement at all times.
Mom almost asked for a divorce when he spent six months or so in the garage building a pontoon boat with two discarded airplane fuel tanks. (Yes, it really did float–and was pretty funny looking–mom made a nice blue and white canvas canopy and side panels to dress it up). We don’t have the packing and overplanning problems in our family–I guess they are the “good enough” or “get a bigger hammer” type of engineers. Dad usually claims to “just know” without reading the manual. “The human mind invented this–the human mind can figure it out. . .it’s not brain surgery.” (Assuming that brain surgeons DO read their manuals). </p>
<p>I doubt that dad ever paid anyone to fix or install anything. Whenever he visits me (12 hour drive), he can’t just relax–he has to go around my house and look for work. Often he’ll come across a job and we’ll say, “Too bad–you’d need (‘special tool’) to do that.” The answer is always, “No problem, I’ve got one out in my van. . .”</p>
<p>My bro is into building motorized scooters and go-carts to endanger the lives of his nephews and nieces (no kids of his own) and is making a wind generator for another (non-engineer) bro. The project is going on for years–he couldn’t buy the blades–he had to make them out of scrap metal. A couple of my sons have the “disease” too. The older one H and I always go to for “tech support” or “consumer reports” on what to buy. The younger one is still in the “take it apart, see what’s inside and use the parts to build weird contraptions” phase (like a nicer version of Sid in Toy Story). His Xmas presents last less than 24 hours. Another son, who probably does have Aspergers, is more of an accountant than a tinkerer.</p>
<p>A friend’s H is a pilot/engineer. They have 4 boys and the wife is a wreck to keep everthing “just so” when H is around. OMG–they have 15yo puzzles and games–with ALL of the pieces–organized alphabetically in the cabinet. The guy will get stressed if she squeezes the toothpaste tube the wrong way.
And their kids have a rule for every minute of the day. (We have the opposite problem in our house–no rules, no schedules, everything lost, can’t FIND the toothpaste let alone worry about how it was squeezed–I usually blame all this on my H’s Irish blood–obviously he’s not an engineer).</p>
<p>Sounds like my father in law (electician before he retired.) They came to visit when we had our first child and FIL was bored. So when they came to visit when I had child no. 2 (21 months after the first one), my husband had all these PROJECTS for his father to do. You can picture it-my mother in law is trying to keep up with the 21 month old, someone drops by to see us, and the house is turned upside down with ceiling fans being installed and lots of other projects, to keep my FATHER IN LAW amused when they are allegedly helping out with the new baby!!!</p>
<p>----I’m curious – I think my H has gotten worse as he’s gotten older. Is this true for anyone else?----</p>
<p>Yes. Much. As I type this, he is constructing a “paint can holder” out of discarded cardboard boxes in order to organize the garage. Nearly all those cans are more than 5 years old and should be thrown out. Yesterday he organized his nuts and bolts by marking the top of them with the size so he could tell at a glance. Meanwhile we eat in the family room because the table is full of stuff.</p>
<p>Used to be I could ask nicely to have things tidied up and he would comply if I specifically told him what to do. Now I close the door on a room or two after I have moved some of his stuff into it.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s Asperger’s. I believe it’s ADD. He goes from one extreme to another in everything.</p>
<p>I definitely agree that overanalysing can cause brain damage. Plus you wait forever to get anything done. On the other hand, walking into Sears, Walmart, etc… and saying; “Ooooh, that TV looks pretty good, I’ll take it”; is also a mistake many times. Then again, ignorance is indeed bliss. </p>
<p>When it comes to technology, my wife conceeds to my expertise. While I don’t take 5 years to make a decision, there is indeed a major difference in quality, reliability, debendability, and service between an RCA/Philips/Element/GPX etc… and a Sony/Hitachi/Pioneer/Mitsubishi etc… My wife always said that the TV in the bedroom was good enough and that it still works so we don’t need anything different. It was a basic cheap Phiilips tv. I never watched it and didn’t care. When my went to college, she needed a tv. We gave her that one and I bought my wife a “Real” tv for the bedroom. She didn’t like the price at first; but since the first time she turned it on and said; “OH MY GOD”, she no longer argues with me about technology.</p>
<p>But you are correct; sometimes you need to just step in and make a decision. No matter what you buy today; it will be obsolete or out of vogue within 6 months. (Technology items). But then again, you can’t keep waiting.</p>
<p>Simba has the key point here.</p>
<p>Optimization…</p>
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It’s great for things like choosing a wife. [In one of his romantic moments, he told me he married me because I was the most logical woman he ever met.] </p>
<p>However, it’s also why H is having a really hard time with the fact that two of his children have chosen Macs over PCs, and he’s working hard to keep the 3rd one in line.</p>
<p>Want to really freak out that car packer- take ALMOST everything outside to be packed, when the job is halfway done, bring out one last item, something oddly shaped- then you can watch Every Single Thing come back out of the car and the entire job start over ;)</p>
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<p>What about husbands? ;)</p>
<p>Sorry, as a female engineer (who has an autistic twin brother, incidentally) I couldn’t resist.</p>
<p>Since my husband is an engineer, I can relate to many of the above stories. It is often very handy to have an engineer husband. My daughter’s laptop broke - it worked if hooked up to an external monitor but the screen did not work. My husband ordered a bulb for about $10 and took apart the whole laptop, including pulling apart parts of the screen that were glued together inside the computer, and put in the new bulb. The whole process took about half an hour or 45 minutes, and the laptop works like new now I am pretty sure that a repair place would have either told us it was not fixable or charged us an exoribtant sum to fix it. I was certain we would need to buy a new computer for my D on short notice, so I am very happy!!</p>
<p>My H is an engineer, and he definitely fits into some of the discussions brought up … especially taking forever to make a decision on purchasing anything. At least I know when he buys me a mother’s day or anniversary card, it says what he means to say … he’s looked at every card twice over. However, he’s also four thumbed, I swear. He’s a mechanical engineer with no mechanical inclination. I know if he starts a project, he’ll rarely complete it … i.e. where we tore down a wall and made a bedroom into a open bonus area about five years ago. We still have the ceiling and walls where the old walls and ceiling were … unfinished, so to speak. If it’s a plumbing project, i.e. replacing the guts of the toilet, then the finished project will give us as much or more grief than when he started. And homework projects with my D, who’s gifted in math but is totally non-inquisitive when it comes to things … he frustrates her to no end, “whoa! DD, if we take this data on out I can plot an extrapolation …yada, yada.” And she’s like, “Dad, just the answer … please, we don’t need all that other crap.” And we won’t even go into the neatness factor … sorely lacking. Beneath all the boxes in the garage that he’s thrown out into his work area … there’s a work bench somewhere. But I can find every user manual, and if I can’t … we might as well throw out the appliance/electronic … the world as we know it is over. </p>
<p>zebes</p>
<p>Daughter of a civil engineer here.</p>
<p>The running joke during our childhood was that we never took a road trip to one of the many fantastic national parks in the west. Our trips were always routed to visit major construction projects: Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, Grand Coulee and so on. We got so we’d ask, “Is this another dam trip?”</p>