For those of us who like a good mystery, engineering can be a fun and exciting field. It is not uncommon for existing conditions to come up that we didn’t plan for.
Sometimes our designs do not get constructed exactly as we planned. Other times, systems just age with time and we have to figure out why they fail. The fancy term for solving mysteries in system failure is “forensic engineering.” If any of you have this term in your job description, it probably means you get paid to figure out why systems fail and offer a professional assessment. For the rest of us, it’s part of our day-to-day grind and our marching orders are usually to “just fix it.”