Telephone engineer at home.

It was a grotesque underestimation on all of our parts to expect my telephone engineer brother to remain calm at all costs.  Just because he had successfully completed what the rest of us considered a highly stressful and tension filled educational program of applied physics, drafting and design and had worked with both analytical and comprehensive problem solving, we thought that he would be able to handle anything.  Apparently that anything did not include his daughter’s first date.  My niece had asked several family members to be on hand for the occasion both for the photographic opportunities but also to restrain her father if necessary. That was a wise choice.  My brother was white with tension and I tried to distract him by asking him to explain the workings of fiber optics.  He whipped through that in less than five minutes.  I could not even pretend to keep up.  I tried.