Typical Day
Waking up slightly before his alarm goes off at 7:00AM, Mike Anical is incredibly excited about the day before him. Mike is a problem solver, viewing each new day as a fun and interesting challenge.
Today, Mike discovers he is out of cream for his coffee and, elated, drafts out eight potential solutions, keeping in mind time, expense, and energy exerted. He decides to put his coffee in a to-go cup, stop at a coffee shop, and "borrow" some cream from the prep table. He engineered that one right out of the park.
After a brief stop at the local coffee shop at 8:37AM, Mike gets to his office just before 9:00AM and starts setting himself up on the computer. Despite how exciting his job is to him, it is mostly just sitting quietly at a desk with the occasional meeting. It's like any other run-of-the-mill office environment. Luckily, he works in a smaller company, so he has more responsibilities (and chances to solve whatever goes wrong).
"Morning, Mike," Steve (coworker, pal, and electrical engineer) steps into his office and greets him, holding his own to-go mug of coffee.
"Steve, my man! How ya doing, buddy? You ready for our ten o'clock?" Mike asks, drumming his fingers excitedly.
"You kill me, Mike. You're all work. Let me sit down first before you start pestering me."
"Just trying to keep you on your toes," Mike says, getting up from his desk and fake-punching Steve in the arm.
"Claaaassic Mike," Steve rolls his eyes and goes to his office. "See you at ten."
Mike gets back to his desk and starts preparing for the 10:00AM meeting he was just talking about. These happen almost every day. Mike finds a problem in the design for a piece of machinery and then he meets with a cross-functional team―which includes Steve and a couple of other guys who specialize in various aspects of quality, feasibility of production, testing procedures, and program management―to try to solve the problem within the capabilities of the company.
Mike starts drafting some ideas and heads to the meeting, arriving in the conference room at 9:53AM, just before anyone else shows up.
During the meeting, as Mike presents his ideas for solutions to their newest problem, the team goes through the usual rigmarole, shouting such declarations as:
"That's unrealistic!"
"Fine, we'll do it this way!"
"No!"
...until they finally come to a solution after close to an hour of frustrated yelling.
The meeting ends at 11:15AM and Mike eagerly rushes off to work on the design upon which he and his team have settled. He's off to a solid six more hours of working quietly at his desk to solve this and review a couple other design problems to check for obvious solutions (though those don't usually exist).
Mike sits at his computer and works on Computer-Aided Design (CAD for short) for an hour or two. When he starts getting antsy sometime around 1:15PM, he starts building a tiny prototype he's designed on the computer with his hands. Then, his favorite part, he gets to test his prototypes to failure.
He destroys what he's made (in a controlled way, of course―he doesn't just smash it) to see what happens when the machinery breaks down and how one would go about fixing it, determining whether or not it needs a redesign.
After hours of prototype building and destroying, Mike realizes it's 5:17PM, just after quitting time—and he's forgotten to eat lunch. Mike cleans up his office, now riddled with tiny splinters of his various prototypes, while munching on one of his emergency protein bars he keeps stashed in his bottom desk drawer―he's a problem solver, remember?
Though eager to continue building and breaking, at 6:21PM, Mike decides it's time to head home and locks up his office. To his chagrin, he won't be coming in tomorrow as he's got to go to a local manufacturing plant to see his work in action.
As he drives home, his brain becomes flooded with new ideas and procedures, so, at a stoplight, he opens the voice recorder app on his phone, quickly dictating some shorthand notes for himself to review upon his return to the office. By 7:00PM, Mike arrives home, excited, but starting to get a little tired. He opens a bottle of wine, starts cooking himself a light dinner, and puts on reruns of Mythbusters.