The industrial maintenance profession has moved well beyond the days when the standard operating procedure was 'measure with a yardstick, mark with chalk, cut with an axe, pound to fit, paint to match.'
Now we enjoy the precision that derives from ubiquitous digital technology and our enormous computational capacity to answer questions we couldn’t even articulate in that prehistoric era. Necessarily, the maintenance technician, the production-line welder, the lowest-level common laborer each must know, at a minimum, how to use a keyboard or touch screen to feed the computational capacity that’s so dominating ordinary life in the manufacturing arena.
Darwin was correct. To some extent, we’re all evolving into geeks. And J. Bennett at Cornell U. in Ithaca, New York, has been able to quantify one’s degree of geekiness by means of what is called a nerdity test.
Tens of thousands of people from around the world have taken the online test, which has 500 yes/no questions. If you click on the box corresponding to the question, it counts as a “yes.” No box click, it means “no.” Once you hit the “submit” button, it returns your score and the statistics from all those who have taken the test since its inception in the early 1990s.
Perhaps the best use of this exercise is to provide insight as to why one’s personal life is as it is. Enjoy.
