His Cup Of Coffee Was Half Full

If the engineer in that joke was so smart, why is he taking chalk into a cleanroom?

Uhm...what engineer are you talking about?  Some sort of super funny joke that I assume rivals The Skeleton Joke?  

Well, no.  And only partially because nothing's funnier than The Skeleton Joke.  In reality, the joke is only fairly amusing, and even then, only among nerdy people.  The joke goes roughly thus:

"A retired engineer gets a phone call from the company he used to work for.  They've been having a problem with a specific piece of machinery and none of their best people seem to be able to solve it, so they call him out of desperation.  He agrees to help.

He shows up at the plant, and spends a day studying and taking measurements on the piece of equipment, and at the end of the day, he takes out a piece of chalk, marks an "X" on a component and says, "Here's where your problem is."  The company has the part replaced, the machine works perfectly again, and everybody rejoices.  

The engineer sends the the company a bill for his consulting services, a charge of $50,000.  The company, outraged over the exorbitant fee, demands an itemized list of the charges.  

The engineer replies, "One chalk mark - $1.  Knowing where to put it - $49,999."

Yeah...definitely not as good as The Skeleton Joke.  

So as you might imagine, pretty much any company that employs engineers has this joke circle around their email system every now and again by people who firstly think that forwarding email jokes is the proper thing to do, and secondly, have been living under a series of rocks for the last 10 years and have never had this joke forwarded to them already.  I work for one of those companies...as an engineer.  Rest assured, I have never forwarded this joke except right here in Blag form.  

The issue with the joke here is that many of the engineers who work here work in a cleanroom environment.  You know...like those guys in the old Intel commercials who dance around in the full body suits with hoods and respiratory systems.  Not quite that extensive, but we have a cleanroom along those lines which requires people to wear the suits and face masks and shoe covers and gloves to keep people form contaminating the products.  Cleanrooms are funny places because of certain things you can't do, such as eat anything, walk quickly, have tables without holes in them, wear makeup, use paper, etc.  It's true...there is a special kind of paper that you have to use in a cleanroom because regular stuff gives off too many particles.  Along those same lines...you're not allowed to use pencils either for the same reason.  If pencils are off limits, what makes this engineer think that chalk is okay?  What an idiot.