WTF #16: Things I Didn’t Know About My Father

As I prepare to make my final move to China to take up my new post, I needed a place to store of all the junk my family has collected in the basement over the past decade or so we’ve live in the house. What better place than to use my parents’ basement for the job. But before I could move my stuff there, I first needed to help my parents clear out all the junk they have collected over the past several decades. As I was rifling through this and that, I came upon a stack of notebooks.

What’s this? US Navy documents? Hmm… And then the next notebook.

And the next…

And so on. Surface Warfare Officers School Command? This has certainly piqued my interest.

For most of my father’s career in the private sector, he was a marine engineer, helping to build huge seafaring cargo vessels. Sometimes, he would be gone for months testing out the new ship on her maiden voyage. He’s been retired for decades now, but he’s never been one to talk much about his working life with his children. I didn’t even know what he did was called “engineering” until I was almost out of high school. I also knew my father was in the navy a long, long, long time ago, but it wasn’t the US Navy, although I do remember a brief consulting stint he did with them. So perhaps these were leftovers from that period.

Still … surface warfare? Sounds intriguing. I wondered what I would find behind these pages. I couldn’t wait. But upon flipping them open, I found the whole thing disappointing and humourously appropriate at the same time. No secret classified information to be found. No intrigue. No eye-popping relevations. Just old, boring engineering documents, with drawings.

Engineering documents for an engineer. Who’d have thunk it?

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What The Flux is a semi-regular weekendish feature on EngineeringBlogs.org that follows the follies and jollies of an engineer in industry, yours truly.