In my house, we we mildly scornful of engineers. My dad used to tell a joke: Put a mathematician and an engineer across a room from a beautiful woman (they were essentially all male at the time), and tell them they could cross half the distance each minute. The mathematician would leave in disgust because he could never get all the way over, but the engineer would stay because he knew he could get close enough.

Like I said, a slightly odd way to grow up...

Personally, I'm more than a little sympathic to the engineer's point of view, at least for this particular situation.