| Sounds a lot like the scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Geordi La Forge meets Scotty. > Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Look, Mr. Scott, I'd love to explain everything to you, but the Captain wants this spectrographic analysis done by 1300 hours. > [La Forge goes back to work; Scotty follows slowly] > Scotty: Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want. > Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour. > Scotty: How long will it really take? > Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: An hour! > Scotty: Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would really take, did ya? > Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Well, of course I did. > Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker. |
LaForge was a competent engineering manager. The writers tended to focus more on the character's people management skills (and, sometimes, terrible personal relationship stuff). He kept things running smoothly. He was smart. You could imagine a detailed maintenance work log for every system on the ship, and there'd be no gaps in it ever since he took the position of chief engineer.
But while Scotty cared about his staff, it was the machinery that he knew inside and out. He never needed to conjure up a hologram of the designer of the warp engines, because he knew them as well as anyone else. His maintenance logs would have gaps because he'd know which things actually needed regular attention, and which ones were just bureaucratic nonsense. He didn't just understand all of it on the technician level, but on the theoretical level too, enabling him to pull off some unlikely saves.
He actually was a miracle worker and maybe one of the best fictional representations of an engineer, and that one scene was written to make him look a little more like a bureaucrat.