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Tales from the Office


Dintiradan

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Whenever I work individually at the university, it's in my office. It can hold up to eight people if you filled every spot, but there's only five people assigned to it this year, and often I'm the only one in it.

 

*KNOCK KNOCK*

 

It's about 20' by 15', with a wall splitting it in half. Imagine a U-shape, with the door on the right side of the base and my spot on the left prong. I go to answer the door.

 

"Hi?"

 

It's two people from the department's Graduate Students' Association.

 

"Hi, we got a complaint. There's apparently a ... rabbit? ... in your office?"

 

"What? No, we don't ... have ... a ..."

 

For the first time today, I look closely at the desks in the other 'prong'. There's a bag of rabbit food on one of them. I take a closer look, and sure enough, there's a cage with a large, dark rabbit inside.

 

"Okay, how long has that been there?"

 

"Long enough for people to complain.

 

I'm feeling terribly observant right now.

 

"Um, for what it's worth, I've been sick all week and this is the first day I'm in..."

 

But who knows how long my rabbit companion has been here, hitherto unobserved? Most days I just come in, head to my desk, and start working. Perhaps it's always been there. Perhaps, when the last graduate student leaves, it's job is finished. It will close all open sockets, SIGKILL all running processes, and lock the office door behind it when it leaves.

 

It's probably going to be moved soon. I just wish all office companions were this quiet.

 

 

Anyone else got stories to share?

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When I was a graduate student in a research lab, we had a guy who felt if there wasn't a complaint about every week then we weren't doing our jobs. Among the complaints were:

 

He took a bunsen burner and set up a ring stand over it with wire screens to diffuse and spread the flame. Then he placed a frying pan over the lit burner and proceeded to make himself lunch using what was described as the greasiest grade of hamburger. The aroma spread down the hallway and our boss got a letter from the department chairman reminding him that we were not allowed to cook in the labs except for coffee makers.

 

Some of the pictures displayed on the lab doors parodying a newspaper ad and using members names got a complaint. It arrived on legal letterhead from someone walking down the hall that wasn't amused. We then taped in layers a series of insulting notes one over the other so if they got removed the insults got worse right next to the complaint letter.

 

One night after the custodians had waxed the floor, a member took some aluminum cans out of a box where they were waiting to go to a recyling center. He set them up as ten pins and then walked down the hall to use a bowling ball on them. The ball's rumble brought a professor out of his office and ended the game.

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Originally Posted By: Randomizer
[...] we were not allowed to cook in the labs except for coffee makers.


This struck me as being a really succinct way of defining the difference between England and America: In England, we'd only be allowed to roast or boil teapots.

(Unless you're talking about roasting people who make coffee, because, intern/work experience jokes aside, that's probably not wise.)
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The labs I've been in have all had a coffee maker of some sort and an electric kettle for tea. It's important to give your postdocs their fuel of choice or they're not going to get anything done.

 

—Alorael, who has noticed that the coffee maker and tea kettle will show up regardless of surrounding hazards. The sodium azide poisoner at Harvard knew exactly what he or she was doing.

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If you're young, you don't know what life is like when you're older. You haven't done it yet, and it's different enough that while you probably can figure out some of it, you don't really understand all of it.

 

If you're older already, you haven't been young for a while. You get all those biases and filters of memory. You have nostalgia. And you weren't who you were then now.

 

I don't think kids really want to be adults, and I don't think adults want to be kids. Not usually. Both involve being something you are not and cannot be if you are still yourself. You don't really want to be that guy whose life seems perfect, either. You want to be yourself but with his money, or his easygoing happiness, or his composure.

 

—Alorael, who will add one more thing, though. You have to do suckish things all the time and homework? Think of how many adults work, and work hard, 45 hours a week or more. Think of how much time they spend commuting. Think of being responsible for everything all the time. Then think of how much fun it is to complain about things, anything, even if you wouldn't change it if it meant giving up everything that came with it.

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How happy you are is affected by a HUGE number of factors that are at least somewhat independent of your age.

 

One statement that I think DOES generally hold true:

 

If you don't feel thrilled with your life as a kid, for whatever reason, you are probably one of the people whose life will get much better when you're an adult. Why? Because you aren't stuck in one house, and one place of occupation, and one set of primary relationships in your life. You can still make choices that make you miserable, but you'll always have the option to leave and go somewhere else if things really aren't going your way.

 

In other words, IT GETS BETTER -- but that is really true for most unhappy teenagers, not just the gay ones.

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I never liked being a kid. I couldn't do most of the things I wanted to do. For instance, I wanted to build a working biplane and fly around the neighborhood. But somehow I knew that my plans wouldn't work. I had accepted that cardboard wouldn't be an adequate building material for an airframe, and the only other material to which I had access was plywood, and I had a feeling it was probably too heavy. I wanted powered flight, but the only motor I thought I might be able to get, that didn't have a power cord, was an old outboard boat motor. I was an uneasy about how well it would really work to replace its little tiny boat prop with a big airplane propeller. I had no idea how engines worked, but I had a feeling that maybe there was a reason those ones always had such small propellers.

 

So I could dream about zipping around the neighborhood rooftops in my little plywood biplane. In my six-year-old mind it would have been about four feet long, and had all the aerodynamic properties of a magic carpet. That would really have been cool. But I knew it wouldn't really work. It was rotten being a kid.

 

Ehh, in some ways I suppose I haven't gotten any better as an adult. The things I really want to do are still all probably impossible. But at least I'm no longer wanting to do them by next week. And this is maybe one of the best things about growing up. Once you have more control over your own life, not only can you do more on any given day, but you can plan and do things that take years.

 

If I really wanted to, now, I could buy an ultralight and fly it. Too bad it's so dangerous; I can't afford to risk the life of my children's father.

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Originally Posted By: Trenton the dragon lord
I wish I could be stuck in the middle, have responsibilities, but not to many. Have fun, party, stay young, and not work. Whats that age again? Like, 17-18...

If only, if only. I need a magic genie in a bottle. Anyone got one on them?

Zoltar speaks!

(But no really--that's a good movie related to the subject)
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Originally Posted By: Trenton the dragon lord
I wish I could be stuck in the middle, have responsibilities, but not to many. Have fun, party, stay young, and not work. Whats that age again? Like, 17-18...


I've heard this question asked before (i.e. what age would you become if you could), and nobody ever answers teenage years (and only a few say college), because frankly those years suuuucked. Almost everybody there said later 20's to mid 30's were the happiest times of their lives, and I'd have to concur with that- independence, in many cases you're married but without kids, most have some semblance of financial stability (i.e. free of crippling debt like you could be in your early 20's), an a whole host of other factors.
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I've heard some people say college, but that's mostly from people in their twenties and sometimes thirties. In general, people I've known seem to say that they're at the best time in their lives around forty to sixty, but before retirement.

 

—Alorael, who interprets this as life getting steadily better until you either lose the purpose that a job can give you or until the downsides of aging start preventing things that you really enjoy.

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Too many people are too concerned about progressing through set-points in life like, getting a job, buying a house, having kids, retiring, then having a funeral. If those are really the most important things for you than do them, but don't do them just because they are somehow the expected "normal" things to do.

 

Personally, I'm in no hurry to jump into my coffin.

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I'm in a hurry to jump out of that coffin again. And Ray Kurzweil says there's no need to die at all if you're careful and lucky over the next few decades.

 

—Alorael, who does think those milestones are useful markers. Getting a job is significant both for meaningful use of time, if it's a good job, and financial self-sufficiency. A house, or anywhere else you live, is independence: a man's house, apartment, or RV is his castle. Kids are a choice, but they're a big one, and at a certain point not having kids is also a milestone. Retiring really depends on what you're retiring from: a job you're sick of is very different from one you can't handle anymore or one you'd keep if you didn't want to have the time to do something else, like hike from Argentina to Alaska on stilts.

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At some point, indeed, not having children represents a milestone that you have passed: you never will have children. Female fertility drops rapidly after age 35. If you haven't had children by the time you (or the potential mother whoever she may be) are 40, the chances are very low that you ever will. It's important to bear this in mind, however you decide.

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Originally Posted By: Lilith
Originally Posted By: like the aphex twins in here
This struck me as being a really succinct way of defining the difference between England and America: In England, we'd only be allowed to roast or boil teapots.


why would you roast a teapot


I'm assuming that you haven't realised I was making fun of Randomizer, who stated that in his office they weren't allowed to cook anything, except coffee pots.

If you did realise, warming a teapot before making tea is how you're supposed to use them. tongue
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If you warm the teapot first, then after you add the boiling water, it will stay boiling hot just a little longer. Most teapots are fairly heavy, and can absorb a fair amount of heat, giving your just-added boiling water a quick temperature drop.

 

I don't really buy it, because boiling water has so doggone much heat in it, I really don't think the temperature drop from heating a teapot can be very big. But maybe I'm just lazy. I haven't checked into this at all.

 

The flavor of your tea can be quite sensitive to even small temperature differences in the water you use to make it. Different components of the tea dissolve at different rates at different temperatures, and getting just the right steeping time at just the right temperature can let you get more good-tasting stuff, and less bad-tasting stuff, into the final product. Again, I'm not at all fussy about this myself, but maybe I'm just lazy and have a rough palate.

 

Coffee is at least as sensitive to time and temperature, but the requirements for good coffee are different. With coffee you want water that is a fair bit less than boiling, and you want to have the coffee grounds in contact with the water for as short a time as possible, because the good flavors are very soluble, and more time just brings bitterness. That's why espresso is so good — fast coffee is better coffee. I still think there must be an even better way to make coffee, though, that just hasn't yet been invented. Laser coffee.

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I'm also a big water drinker, but in the past month I've taken up tea again. I've found that I still prefer herbal tea to true tea, like white more than black and black more than green, and find that spiced teas are delicious.

 

It's funny looking at the research on tea and coffee. There's been a lot of effort to link tea to good health outcomes and a lot of effort to link coffee to poor health, or so the phrasing and hypotheses of the studies lead me to believe. Both actually seem to be good for you, on the whole. The most entertaining finding is that you should probably be most careful with the heat, because while coffee and tea haven't been strongly related to any health problems, very hot beverages have been tentatively linked to oropharyngeal cancers.

 

—Alorael, who is not a very good tea purist. He generally microwaves his water in a mug and then puts the teabag in if he's just making tea for himself. When he's making loose-leaf, usually for guests, he just uses the kettle as a teapot once it has boiled. And while he does roughly keep in mind how long various teas are supposed to steep, he overheats and overbrews most of his tea.

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Good espresso isn't bitter, but you don't always get good espresso. I've had very hit-and-miss results with Starbucks espresso in the US, for instance, to the point where I gave up and started just getting filter. In Italy, though, where it's hard to get any kind of coffee other than espresso, it's also really hard to get coffee that's not really good. I don't understand this, because coffee isn't grown in Italy, and the Italian machines are exported all over the world. I think it must be a threshold economics thing, where Italians got enough good coffee that they started insisting on it, and anybody selling coffee had to make it good or go out of business. So maybe it will slowly spread around the world.

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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
Espresso (no 'x') has to be made by machine, but just having the machine doesn't mean using it properly. Good espresso isn't bitter, but you don't always get good espresso. I've had very hit-and-miss results with Starbucks espresso in the US, for instance, to the point where I gave up and started just getting filter. In Italy, though, where it's hard to get any kind of coffee other than espresso, it's also really hard to get coffee that's not really good. I don't understand this, because coffee isn't grown in Italy, and the Italian machines are exported all over the world. I think it must be a threshold economics thing, where Italians got enough good coffee that they started insisting on it, and anybody selling coffee had to make it good or go out of business. So maybe it will slowly spread around the world.

Maybe it's something in the water.
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Originally Posted By: like the aphex twins in here

I'm assuming that you haven't realised I was making fun of Randomizer, who stated that in his office they weren't allowed to cook anything, except coffee pots.


i did not realise that, and instead pictured you roasting a whole boar on a spit or something in the middle of the lab, because that seemed like a very british thing to do
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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
I think it must be a threshold economics thing, where Italians got enough good coffee that they started insisting on it, and anybody selling coffee had to make it good or go out of business. So maybe it will slowly spread around the world.


I hope it makes its way to the UK soon. The lower quality of coffee has been the hardest thing to adjust to.
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Originally Posted By: Trenton the dragon lord
Im hooked on the monster energy drink... Thats my favorite, however my mother never lets me have it >.>

Someone needs to tone down the sugar.

I mostly drink water--over 1.5 gallons a day (no joke). I also drink orange juice and coffee.
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Originally Posted By: Excalibur

I mostly drink water--over 1.5 gallons a day (no joke).


unless you work outdoors in the desert or something that is not really normal, you should probably go and see a doctor and make sure everything's okay. it's possible you could have diabetes or some other disorder
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That's reasonable, if probably more than you need. Or, if you're either very active or somewhere very warm, perfect.

 

—Alorael, who drinks about 4-5 tumblers of water a day. He has no idea how much his tumblers hold, and he's noticed that he drinks about that much no matter whose tumblers he's using.

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My drinking habits are rather varied, though my love is assuredly coffee. I drink coffee recreationally and out of necessity, and it is because of the necessity I have for drinking coffee that I try not to drink too much of it. For instance, I refrain from coffee on the weekends, as well as limiting myself to one or two cups during the week, to try to prevent my body from getting too used to the caffeine. The potency is critical.

 

As a result of limiting my coffee intake, but still having additional thirst needs, I've diversified. After a health examination a few years ago, I've taken to drinking more water, as it is a panacea for most ailments, from fatigue to headaches. I probably still don't drink enough of it, anywhere from 36-62 ounces per day. Then again, that's just what I get directly from drinking water.

 

Alas, though, water doesn't actually taste that great (unless I'm truly thirsty). So, as a treat, when I'm not having coffee because the hour is too late or I've already had enough for one day, I'll have milk, usually with chocolate. This is especially handy when I'm eating especially spicy food. Chocolate milk truly is a great treat, too, since, between fortifications and just the nature of milk, there's a bounty of nutrients in the stuff. And it's delicious!

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Originally Posted By: Lilith
unless you work outdoors in the desert or something that is not really normal, you should probably go and see a doctor and make sure everything's okay. it's possible you could have diabetes or some other disorder

Good thing Excalibur does live in a desert, then. (And we know he spends time outdoors in the spring at the very least in order to frolic among the neighborhood grape hyacinths. tongue )

Originally Posted By: Alorael
I've found that I still prefer herbal tea to true tea, like white more than black and black more than green, and find that spiced teas are delicious.

Where does your rating of oolong tea go? I don't drink much tea, but I find I prefer oolong to black or green. It's lighter than black tea without the grassy flavor of green tea.

Dikiyoba prefers white tea to oolong, and hot chocolate to any tea. And the only coffee Dikiyoba drinks is the occasional mocha (which is, after all, just a hot chocolate with a bit of espresso thrown in) from non-Starbucks sources.
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Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba
Good thing Excalibur does live in a desert, then. (And we know he spends time outdoors in the spring at the very least in order to frolic among the neighborhood grape hyacinths. tongue )


i know he lives in nevada but 6 litres of a water a day is still super excessive for most people. now that i've found out it's actually only 3 litres that's a lot more reasonable
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Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba
just a hot chocolate with a bit of espresso thrown in) from non-Starbucks sources.


Okay, so I was in Missoula on Thursday, and I got bullied into going to starbucks with some people.

Holy. Freaking. Crap.

I got a cookie for me and a weird sucker thing for a guuurl. Five dollars. Seriously?
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Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba
Dikiyoba prefers white tea to oolong, and hot chocolate to any tea. And the only coffee Dikiyoba drinks is the occasional mocha (which is, after all, just a hot chocolate with a bit of espresso thrown in) from non-Starbucks sources.

Hot chocolate is my drink of choice most of the time. I can't stand coffee or tea, so it's pretty much the only hot beverage I drink.
That said, now that fall is here, I'm on an apple cider (soft, for those of you who live where cider implies hard) binge.
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