The Pipeline
A stream (or rather, a pipeline) of a non-existent consciousness
I'm a civil engineering major, and I was taking some classes on designing transportation systems. Sorry, I forgot to mention that I'm also involved in extracurricular groups as well. Everyone has this stereotype that engineering students don’t do anything outside of class. Granted, most of my extracurriculars are affiliated with professional civil engineering societies, but they still count.
Anyway, one activity at one of these groups asked this: design a pipeline to transport blood from New London to New York. One thousand liters per second, to be exact. Now, this was an easy challenge. This is less than the Keystone XL pipeline was slated to transport, and blood is much less viscous than oil, so I started doing what I do best. With my group, I got out SolidWorks, mapped out the pipeline, looked through the exact permits we'd needs, and finished the design process in about four hours. But after this happened, this club leader had the nerve to tell me that I failed!
The club leader went on this long-winded speech. I forget the details, but she said stuff like “The point of this exercise was to ask yourself: why was someone asking you to do this? Whose blood was it? Is it a problem with civil engineering as a profession if civil engineers are willing to do this?" She failed to realize that the answers to the above questions are trivial.
For the first one, it's because I'm a civil engineering student. Anyone who wants a blood pipeline doesn’t want a blood spill, so they hire a civil engineer. It's that easy! For the second one, that's a demographics problem; that's not why you hire a civil engineer. And for the third one, no. Would you rather that you had uninspected blood pipelines everywhere.
I answered all of those; she told me that those were rhetorical questions, and that I was missing the point. Well, rhetorical questions aren't what let you build pipelines, so I’d call that a win for me.
Anyway, back to my classes on transportation systems (which, after all, are the point of this article). My professor was discussing some proposals to build new high-speed rail track along the Northeast Corridor, and he said that these proposals were “in the pipeline.” I’m not entirely sure why you’d need a pipeline to transport proposals. If a proposal is a digital file, you could transport it with fiber-optic cables. If a proposal is on paper, you would typically transport it by mail. Maybe the pipeline is some sort of pneumatic tube system? The professor was very unreceptive when I asked whether this pipeline was a pneumatic tube system, and if not, what sort of pipeline it was. I guess I should talk to a mechanical engineering professor if I want that one answered.
But I didn’t have time for now, so I walked back to my dorm room. Everyone online was talking about how there was controversy about the construction of a new pipeline. I wondered if it was a blood pipeline or a railway proposal pipeline. Turns out it’s an oil pipeline. Then again, by my earlier calculations, you could send blood through it no problem. Railway proposals would be a bit more complicated.
(Note: this is a work of fiction. I am not a civil engineering major, and I only occasionally misunderstand obvious metaphors)