Today celebrates licensed professional engineers, commemorating the anniversary of the first professional engineering license issued in the United States to Charles Bellamy on August 8, 1907.

I don’t actually know how many licensed PEs I’ve known. I’m not even sure I understand fully what this license means, except that it’s needed for civil and structural engineering and for working on public projects like roads and buildings, presumably so that you don’t (intentionally or otherwise) design a bridge to collapse after the millionth car goes over it.

I have a soft spot for engineers in general. I also stereotype the hell out of them because in my experience, they are an odd bunch. They’re not all odd in the same way, but every one I’ve ever met definitely looked at the world in a way totally foreign to the way my brain works. Not that I hobnob with gazillions of engineers, mind you. Maybe ten. So this is a very small sample, not to be trusted any more than anything else I say.

Anyway. Yes. All the engineers I’ve known: odd. And that’s an absolutely delightful thing. So much better than my own boring and bovine conventional acceptance of things.

My grandfather was a mechanical engineer and his view of life was almost maddeningly practical. If the math was there, the thing was doable. Didn’t matter if the flesh was weak. He softened a bit on this as he (or maybe as I) got older, but it never went away entirely.

He was also of an ilk that I came to classify as “wordy engineers.” These guys read a lot and have interests beyond their particular corner of the world and are happy to engage with you on pretty much any topic, although they might tell you in blunt terms all the ways that you’re wrong. A lot of history buffs. A few mystery or political thriller aficionados. Big sports fans, by and large.

When I was in college, I dated a chemical engineering major for about five minutes. He was a “nonwordy engineer.” He didn’t watch TV, he didn’t listen to music. Most of what he read was mathy in nature—but to be fair, he was carrying a math-heavy class load. We went to a couple movies and usually he’d have checked out from the story by the time the title card had faded from the screen. I asked him a couple times what he was thinking about instead, and the answers were variations on the theme of “they showed the steam blowing off that locomotive  and I was wondering how much a titanium train would cost to develop.”

You see? Odd. Sometimes fun, 100-percent interesting, but generally odd.

The other defining characteristic (stereotype) is something my mom used to call “engineer brain,” which was a sort of euphemism for “socially inept.” Again, the root is similar, but the symptoms vary. Most of the engineers I’ve known were either wildly impatient and brusque or incredibly tranquil and courteous, but there was always a moment of disconnect somewhere along the way. One friend of mine would be rolling along in a conversation and then say something so incomprehensible that I’d wonder if he’d had a stroke, but no, it was just some 27-chess-move leap of logic that I hadn’t followed. Another guy I knew was incredibly kind and solicitous but had zero idea that his friendly overtures led more than one woman to think he was madly in love with them rather than just achingly polite—and he was even more oblivious when they were clearly going ga-ga for him in return. A friend of my grandfather’s was notorious for sitting in on conversations and delivering blistering ripostes—20 minutes later, and after the conversation had changed topic at least three times. My grandfather never figured out if the rest of the world was too fast for him and he couldn’t keep up or if the world was too slow so he’d think of his answer and then wander off on his own and process about 20 other things before circling around and the words left his mouth.

But, see, without these guys, you wouldn’t have trains, titanium or otherwise. Or bridges that don’t collapse. Or sewer systems or rocket ships or pretty much anything you can think of. An odd way of looking at the world leads to creative solutions and new approaches. Hug an engineer! They might freak out, but something new and exciting might come of it!