Are Engineers RETARDED?????

"Chemistry sort of scares me!"
That was the last line in the introductory speech of an aerospace engineer in the class that I am teaching this semester.
"Yeah, I know what you mean man! Same here!" I noted that he found a kindred spirit.
"Me too....I really don’t like chemistry. I am here because it is a course requirement" chanted a few others.
I was almost beginning to panic. I have never encountered so many chemistry-haters in a single room ever before. Previously I taught chemistry majors and pre-meds and it wasn’t surprising that they were as crazy about chemistry as I was. This semester, I was allotted to teach engineers and it was like a rude shock for me when I realized that not everybody in this whole wide world is madly in love with chemistry.
I mean, how can somebody deny chemistry its due reverence. Chemistry is what makes the world go 'round. You can’t undermine CHEMISTRY. Why, God himself must be a chemist and there is no denying that.
I decided to start from the very beginning. I handed the chalk to a geeky bespectacled computer engineer in front of me and asked him to draw an Erlenmeyer flask on the board. After a while of nail-biting and shuffling, he finally drew a very hackneyed beaker! I frantically began searching my vocabulary to find encouraging words that would make his mistake seem a little less grave.
"Umm....very good effort, I must say....but is this a flask at all? Shouldn’t we call this a beaker?"

"What does it matter what we call it? They are both used to keep water" Zach said, very matter-of-factly. I don’t know what engineering he was into but this dude bore a mighty strong resemblance to John Abraham and therefore the wise-crack was excused!

I decided to take them into the lab thinking that maybe hands-on experience will do them some good. But they refused to get their hands onto the instruments! They stood around fiddling with their pens and calculators instead of actually setting up the experiment.

"In my electrical engineering lab, they actually give us circuit diagrams and so I know exactly what to do" wailed an electrical engineer.
"Well, I am not teaching you guys how to cook and so I can’t give you a recipe. You have to come up with your own procedure" I was beginning to lose patience here.
Then I started getting assaulted from all directions......
"How do we operate a burette?"
"Which one is the pipette?"
"Will you give us an equation or something because I really can’t work unless I see one?"
"Oops....I just broke a funnel!!!!!!"

At the end of the three hours, I was exhausted. I always thought that engineers had slight short-circuiting in the grey cells but these kids were RETARDED! As I worked my way towards the material sciences department I wondered how I was going to deal with them for an entire semester.
I slumped down in my seat and tried hard to concentrate on what the professor was saying. I am taking a course in the Materials Engineering this semester and so I was a bit worried about the mathematical aspects of this course. You see, it has been ages since I did my last differentiation.
I stared at the foreign words on the blackboard like corrosion, beam energy and tried to fathom what the instructor was trying to say. And then, suddenly, like a flash of lightening, it all became clear to me. Finally, I could see the truth and my heart brimmed over with sheer remorse. Why, those poor kids seem as retarded to me as I must seem to this great engineer right here in front of me rattling weird sounding things like friction and dynamics.

If this world is a stage, then both chemists and engineers have their own niches and now that it has become necessary to encroach upon each other's territories, there be the initial teething pains. THAT can’t be helped. But I still believe that God is a chemist and I am sure nobody will challenge that!