Some folks don't need to be any more awake than necessary.
Just had a visit from a fellow (I won't say what level of the organizational chart he's at, merely that he's on there, and the fact that I won't say where exactly should give you a clue about his position relative to mine) but every once in a while he rouses from his daily grind and starts thinking.
All sorts of flights of fancy about marvelous technological doohickies and ways of doing things, which is great, except it's usually stuff that's already been around a while. It's like he's just heard about this stuff called "fire" and you can do EVERYTHING with it--heat water! Cook food! Burn down Rome! AMAZING! And then there's this thing called a "wheel"--ooWEE! Now THAT thing is SLICK!
So, he goes through all that, and then jumps to the conspiracy theories that he usually keeps tamped down into his mental sock drawer--"You know--the sled people had a lock on moving things, and they bought the wheel from those guys and now NO ONE can use wheels!" Oh, and don't get him started on Big Ice and how they managed to squelch that whole thing about the machine where you could carry a source of fire around WITH YOU in your POCKET! From there, on to how they taught us all this in school and as soon as we got out we forgot it--and I'm thinking, "What this 'we' business, Kemosabe?!", but he keeps on his Junior Einstein riff about all this stuff and trying to get out on the cutting edge and all those ideas just keep roiling around and shooting out like popcorn and you get the idea that in his mind, he's very close to developing a unified field theory, the only holdback to which is finding a secure source of unobtanium and a Green Hornet PEZ dispenser.
He finally went on to his office, bless his heart.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at August 16, 2005 02:23 PMIt was at least a visit like that, rather than one that was prefaced by: "Before you do anything else, get some coffee, get relaxed and settled in, I need to ask you about something that I did and what happened...."
Which, of course, had the exact opposite of the intended result... A full two weeks of data gone *poof*, and he wants me to be "relaxed" before he tells me. Nice!
Posted by: Byron Todd at August 17, 2005 03:48 PMThat's terrible! You're right--at least in my case the only thing I lost was time.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at August 17, 2005 03:59 PM