Open Letter to Mom

Dear Mom,

This is your only daughter writing. The daughter that you formed, framed, and fashioned into almost a perfect likeness of yourself. Not only that, the daughter who willingly and eagerly wants to become more like you. I thought I had closely followed in your footsteps these 22 years, but I was mistaken. You have hidden something from me. I now question a part of you.

How in the world did you major in Electrical Engineering? Do you actually understand this stuff that I am reading about in my Instrumentation class? Can you decipher this sentence: “When biasing an emitter follower, for instance, you choose the base voltage divider resistors so that the divider presents a stiff voltage source to the base, i.e., their parallel impedance is much less than the impedance looking to the base” (1)? I don't think you can.

Don't get me wrong; it's not that I don't think you are smart enough to grasp EE. It's just that I've never seen you solder. You haven't tinkered around in the garage making feedback amplifiers. I don't think you even own an oscilloscope. Unless it is in our attic, in which case I doubt you climb up there to use it.

So, how is it possible that you devoted 4 years of your life to this subject, and yet, a visitor in our house would not see any evidence of it? Of course, evidence of other learned subjects is scattered about our house. On top of our coffee table lay quilt designs sketched on graph paper with fractions and equations in the margins. Possible math major? The paintings in our house illustrate scenes of the frontier and sledding through a Currier and Ives America. Maybe a history buff lives here. Consider the books we own. The One-Minute Manager. Who Moved My Cheese? What Color is Your Parachute? Face it, none of the books, paintings, movies, kitchen utensils, fabric swatches, or anything else we own suggest a higher level of knowledge about diodes and resistors.

All of this leads me to three possible conclusions.

1. You BSed your way to a B.S. (2). You didn't like EE, you didn't care to learn about it, and when the provost handed you your diploma, you promptly and purposely forget everything you learned.

2. You earned your degree through hard work, graduated, sold your textbooks to pay for concert tickets, let Uncle Joe borrow your soldering iron and function generator, and then you got a job that required little-to-no electrical engineering skill.

Or 3. You really are a crazy, robot-building electrical engineer. This stuff about you going to work every day is just to disguise your real occupation as mad scientist. Your secret lab is hidden away in our attic, and every day you turn on the oscilloscope to watch your robot-baby's heartbeat through the monitor (3). One day your robot-baby will destroy. destroy! Destroy! Until then, you will make quilts with GPS-enabled chips in the seams so you can track your prey.

If you really are living life #3, please take me with you as you begin to conquer. I don't want to go to my electronics class anymore.

I love you very much,
your daughter

(1) Horowitz, Paul and Winfield Hill. The Art of Electronics. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge: 2001. p 96.

(2) The closest I have come to cussing in a while.

(3) The heartbeat closely resembles a cosine (x^2) wave.