In the main, engineers serve the public. It’s our duty, our responsibility, our ethical obligation, to serve the public interest, particularly in the view of public safety.
Bridges, roads, pipelines, buildings, process plants, airplanes: engineers involved in design, building or operating these assets in the public realm are, simply, in service to the public. Sometimes, serving the public, in the name of safety, overrides (or should override!) the wishes of our clients.
With the degree, and this positioning as one who primarily serves the public, if this makes you proud and confident, you're an engineer. If not, maybe you’re not.

I have a civil engineering degree, and I’m damn proud of that.

Through my career, though, I haven’t often called myself “an engineer”.

My image of engineers continues to be the stereotypical one of those doing the design, building or operating.
And I don’t design, build or operate.

But importantly, I definitely identify as someone with an engineering degree. Similarly, lawyers and accountant would as well.

Now: with AI able to do tasks that engineers/lawyers/accountants learn at university, and which used to take weeks to do, it feels even more important to understand what having engineering/accounting/law degrees will actually mean.

I have a Canadian bloodline family, mostly residing quite a distance from Brisbane, and, I have a nearby step-in-law family through my Australian husband. My Canadian bloodline family is far-flung, residing in many worldwide locations, and also, admittedly, not all that communicative. This is a striking contrast to my local, close-knit, and noisy/chatty step-in-laws.

The unexpected tension of simultaneously being needed by both: the proximate yet ‘step-in-law’ family, and bloodline family at a distance, is testing me.

I’m glad I have skills to help deal with this: compartmentalising emotions, time management, and, probably most importantly: recovery quiet time for myself.

I saw this group of pelicans and thought, gee those are big bodies. Then (oddly), I thought, why haven’t I ever seen a dead pelican?
I’m a city girl. I’ve never seen a dead animal larger than a possum. Not a dead dog, horse, cow. Roadkill kangaroos from within speeding vehicles doesn’t count.
My life is so sanitised. No dead bodies, no bad smells. A clean little bubble. I wonder about these clean urban lives, no mess.
Real life includes dead animals. Made me wonder if I’m missing out on experiencing real life.
Maybe this is just a weird 100words.

In my haste to post 100-words on time yesterday, instead of posting my own photo, I used a random photo of wooden bowls from the internet...which I now can't find again... which brings up attribution issues (ethics, anyone?)

LinkedIn won't let me replace yesterday's photo unless I delete the whole post and re-post ... so instead, here is a photo of actual husband-created bowls :)

(pretty similar... these are better of course.)

Apologies to the creator of yesterday’s photo of bowls, for my not attributing it. In my past 100-word campaigns, I always attributed the images.
So, oops, mea culpa.

I admire hobbies that result in physical, tangible objects, like woodworking, painting/sculptures, even knitting or needlepoint. These hobbies focus the brain and hands very differently than most engineering/knowledge work does (answering emails and attending meetings, anyone?)
I’m considering that I probably need to develop some ‘better’ hobbies, looking into the future. Currently, maybe unfortunately, my hobbies don’t produce anything (i.e.: reading, running). A few years ago, my husband retired without any hobbies in place. It was a difficult time, because we observed his internal ‘worth’ go from high to zero. Now that he’s a full-on woodworker, we’re all better off.

Sometimes we have “things” (dramas/challenges) going on in our lives, sometimes more than one. Right now, I have at least four going on (related to my family, my in-laws, a work commitment, and a (self-imposed) commitment to developing a new skill). Each deserve 100% of my attention. Each of them, on its own, would be quite bearable, and even enjoyable even if challenging. Overlapping like this, it’s stretching my capacity.
I’ve caught myself in many “should’ve” loops (I should’ve “done something different”). Alas, that thinking doesn’t help. During stressful times, simply aim to be kind: to yourself, and to others.

In 2019, I started writing #100wordsaday here on LinkedIn (wasn’t really every day). I kept it up for almost 6 years, and even put 100 of them into a book.
I’m now tagging it #100wordsofmine. That’s so I can continuously claim ‘no AI has been involved’. These are my words, even while Copilot is always encouraging me to ask it for help. The only technology in use here is Word’s word count.
Why is this important? I’ve decided that in this emerging new way of work/being, original thought will become scarce. So, I will contribute mine.
Here’s to 100 words!