of women doing the job I do.

Oh, there are plenty of women in engineering jobs, in fact there are quite a few of my customers who have talented and in fact inspired engineers of the female persuasion.

Field work, not so much. They don’t even apply for the jobs. I’ve had a few that I practically begged to come apply for jobs at my company, and they all begged off.

I wish to hell I knew why. It isn’t as if my colleagues were mysogynists, in fact like myself most of them would rather work with women, because as a general rule female engineers are more ordered and methodical than men. It isn’t as if the job is particularly difficult, because for a gifted engineer it isn’t, and as I’ve already said the most of them I run across are in fact gifted.

In fact in memory the only woman I encountered in my travels was an engineer named Susan who worked for Brown and Sharp, working on CMM’s. Susan was very good, and in fact is still one of the most respected women in the business. She was on a job I was also working, some eighteen years ago.

I remember she drank hard in off hours. In retrospect the loneliness of the road must have worn on her, it was early enough in my career that I had yet to be beaten down by the road. She was a seasoned road warrior, and in the couple weeks we worked together I learned a lot from her, about how not to let life on the road plainly suck out your soul. Maybe by hearing her warnings- which I heeded- I saved myself from being battered as badly as I might have, I don’t know.

I do know that people like Brigid are one in a billion. And she’s so much more talented in every way even than many of the men whose nearly exclusive territory she occupies.

Watching what she does and seeing how she works helps me understand some of the sense of weary sadness that I sensed from Susan, all those years ago.