In the late sixties, I spent several summers working in a gas station.  I learned how to rebuild brakes, mount and balance tires, and perform basic maintenance and repair tasks.  I also pumped gas.

For those too young to remember, these were the days when you would pull into a gas station and someone would pump your gas, check your cars fluids, fill up your tires,  and wash your windows.  I was also taught to look for opportunities to sell tires, batteries, wiper blades and replacement fluids.  Although it was essentially a sales job, it gave me an opportunity to learn some basic auto mechanics which probably saved me a lot of money with my own NCPO (non-certified pre-owned) cars. 

At the time, my friends and co-workers referred to me as a Gas Pump Jockey.  I was fine with that.  It wasn’t until I got to college and my dorm-mates and I were joking around about resumes that I adopted the title Petroleum Placement Engineer to describe my summer job.

Judiciously naming things can confer credibility, warranted or not.  That’s not rocket science.  Consider Political Science, which is a science largely because it makes use of Social Science.   The latter attempts to understand and predict human behavior.  The accuracy of pre-election polling is one measure of how well that works. <continue reading>