Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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sasha
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Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by sasha » January 27th, 2018, 6:11 pm


(A mostly true story in the glamorous life of two low-level industrial physicists. Happened sometime in 1998 or 1999, I think…)


The new Vice President of Science and Engineering was touring the development laboratories, and our boss, Al, had asked us to tidy up our lab for the occasion.

Jim was dismantling apparatus he'd built months before for an optics experiment he'd never gotten around to, and was putting the components back into a small-parts bin. "This is ridiculous," he grumbled. "The bigwigs have no idea what a real-life laboratory looks like. They expect something straight from the Cole-Parmer catalog."

"Or a movie set," I agreed. "Maybe we should cobble up a Jacob's ladder or something."

“Yeah, or something with a lot of flashing lights.” Then he picked up a helium-neon laser, the kind used in supermarket checkouts. "Actually," he said thoughtfully, "I could set up an expander and some fold mirrors, and steer the beam through a diffraction grating..."

"That'd be cool," I said with a laugh. "And I need to recalibrate the scanning galvo's, so I'll run them with the new software, and measure the drive signal."

He nodded. "Yep. One look at us pushing back the frontiers of science, and he'll move us to the fast track!"

"Now, Jim," I pretended to admonish. "You know very well the only fast track here is in Marketing..."

"That's right," he said, chuckling a little ruefully. He set the laser down and leaned his elbow on the counter. "No one sees us geeks. We turn over our results so They can get the glory, the promotions, and the six-figure salaries. Then when they find out they're over their heads, they turn to us to pull rabbits out of hats to save their sorry asses."

There was no stopping Jim when he got going, so I just stoked the fire. "Maybe if we joined the Country Club..."

He smiled a little wanly and shook his head. "Yeah, we could do that if we were tall, had great hair, and knew how to use a tennis racquet or golf club." He laughed again, a little peevishly this time, and gave a fatalistic shrug. "Even if I could afford the fashion sports, I'm hopelessly uncoordinated. I'd just make a fool of myself, or break something if I tried. I guess I'm stuck here on the nerd track."

I swept four or five piles of screws he'd carefully sorted by size and thread pitch into a paper cup. "Me too," I told him. "Even back in high school. Whenever someone threw a basketball my way, my instinct was to duck. My teammates never hesitated to express their appreciation afterwards, in the locker room."

He laughed and nodded with recognition. He snagged a nearby stool with his foot, dragged it towards him, and settled atop it. "There were always three or four of us dorks in the same gym class," he recalled, "and the coach always seemed to find ways to pit us against his favorites on the varsity teams." He rolled his eyes. "It wasn't pretty," he said. "He might intervene whenever it looked like one of us might get hurt, but that was only to prolong the hilarity."

The countless humiliations of my own high-school Phys Ed were coming back to me. "There was one other fat kid in my gym class," I told him. "We were always on opposite teams, because we were the last two chosen. Except for wrestling. Then we’d just naturally pair up, and take turns letting each other win." I couldn't prevent a little of the bitterness from seeping out. "All the jocks loved it. Whenever it came to be our turn on the mat, they'd start giggling and nudging each other, like they were watching some kind of all-lesbian porno flick." I snorted a short, humorless chuckle. "Which, in a sense, maybe they were."

Jim gathered up a large, untidy handful of spec sheets and product literature and proceeded to separate it into piles. "Sounds like we went to the same high school," he commiserated. He looked up from his stacks of papers and glanced around the lab. "Say, what happened to our file cabinet?"

"We stuck it in the service tunnel to get it out of the way."

"Oh, yeah." He dismounted the stool, clambered past the Synrad CO2 laser and the free-standing air conditioner, and opened the narrow door to the tunnel. He peered inside and hissed, "Hey, Roy!"

I was lining up Allen wrenches on the optical table according to size. "What?"

"You know all that junk in the service tunnel?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's a graveyard for the Mechanical Lab."

"Not any more," he said. "It's empty!"

I looked up. "No way," I stated. In all of my years with the company, the tunnel had been a repository for machinery too obsolete to be of any use, but too expensive to be simply thrown away. When we'd crammed the file cabinet in here, there'd barely been room for it in the disorganized heap of castings and partly-assembled machines. "Really?"

"See for yourself."

I dropped what I was doing, crossed over to where he stood, and looked through the doorway. Sure enough, apart from the night crew's mop and bucket, our file cabinet was the only object between us and the alluring darkness beyond.

"I think we need to check this out," I said.

"I concur whole-heartedly," he replied, and giggled with gleeful anticipation as he stepped sideways through the door. He squeezed past the file cabinet and waited for me, a broad, childlike grin on his face.

"Wait up," I said, and followed suit. I had to suck my belly in to get past the cabinet, and something on the wall caught at my pants, but once unsnagged, I found myself standing behind the file drawers in unexplored territory, at the end of a dark, narrow corridor barely two feet wide and some fifteen feet long. To our right was the silvery, insulated wall of the Environmental Chamber, perhaps eight feet high; above that was a large, inaccessible open space crisscrossed by water pipes and the very girders of the building itself. At the far end of the tunnel, we could make out a closed door on the left. "Where does that lead to?" I asked.

Jim shrugged. "Electrical Assembly, I think. Let's go see." He snapped the light switch off and on a few times. "Damn. The lights don't work."

"Ah, we won't need them as long as we keep the door open," I told him. Our eyes were already adapting to the dark, so we set off down the length of the corridor. When we got to the end, we discovered another passageway stretching off to the right, opposite the door.

"Holy shit!" I whispered excitedly. "Look at this!" and I gestured down the second corridor. I felt like I did when I was 12 and discovered a secret room in my parents' house. "I never knew this was here!"

"This is Awesome," he whispered, and started laughing again.

"Shhh!" I cautioned.

"This can be our Annex!" he said, trying unsuccessfully to keep his voice down. "We can put the hot tub in here!"

"Right next to the wet bar. The large-screen TV can go here."

"Wait 'til the Marketing babes see this!" and he rubbed his hands together. "We can hang a couple of hammocks, or Murphy beds."

"Jim, Jim," I intoned. "We're physics geeks. We're invisible to the babes."

He slapped his forehead in mock self-recrimination. "Right. What was I thinking?" He took a step down the new corridor, but stumbled over a piece of electrical equipment on the floor. "Woops. Hey, what is this, anyway?" and he nudged it with his foot.

It began to vibrate and hum.

"I don't know," I said. "Looks like some kind of... thing."

"It's making a noise," he said.

"I know," I said. "I can hear it."

He looked at me and laughed, a little less confidently this time. "Maybe we'd better get back to the lab."

I tried to be nonchalant. "Okay." I turned to lead the way, but the floor was slippery with years' accumulation of powdery dust, and as I turned the corner, I slipped. I would have careened into the wall had I not managed to catch at the knob of the closed door. Before I could regain my balance, though, it swung open under my weight, and I tumbled into the room beyond.

I squinted in the sudden glare of fluorescent lighting and looked around. I was in Electrical Assembly. A half-dozen girls seated at benches were crimping wiring harnesses to circuit boards, and another was putting the finished boards onto a rack which would be taken to the next assembly station. They all looked up at my spectacularly graceless entrance and beheld me for a moment with a curiously bovine blend of wonder, bemusement, and boredom.

"Sorry," I said, and retreated back into the tunnel, pulling the door shut behind me.

Meanwhile, Jim had maneuvered by me and down the corridor, past the file cabinet, and back into the lab. As I clicked the door shut, I heard a crash and cry of pain. What the hell, I thought. I whirled around to see what had happened, and seemingly out of nowhere, something hard and metallic struck me in the face. There was a white flash and a jab of pain high on my cheek, and I heard the clatter of my glasses landing somewhere nearby on the floor. "Ow!" I shrieked, and clapped my hand over my right eye. "Goddammit!"

Then my vision cleared and I saw what had happened.

I had walked into a fuse box.

With one hand pressed over my eye, I managed to find my glasses, miraculously unbroken; and I somehow made my way back to the lab without incurring further injury. I stepped back into the light and shut the tunnel door behind me.

Jim was seated on the stool, rocking back and forth. His face was pinched with pain. He had rolled up one of his pants' legs, and was rubbing a nasty-looking purple welt just below his knee.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I tripped over that fucking air conditioner," he replied testily. Then he looked up at me. "What about you?"

"I walked into the fuse box," I told him.

We stared at each other.

"Well, aren't we a pair," I finally said, the implications of the escapade beginning to dawn on me. As if to verify our hypotheses experimentally, we'd followed our joint confessions of klutziness with this ludicrous demonstration of it. Despite himself, Jim began to snicker; and within the space of a few seconds, we were helpless with laughter. It was several minutes before we had composed ourselves enough to resume work, and even then, one of us would think about it and start giggling, which would set off the other all over again.

Somehow we finished tidying the lab and set up our little show in time for our visitors. Jim had mounted the He-Ne laser on his bench and was guiding the beam through an elaborate maze of mirrors and lenses, one of which he was sliding back and forth to create a speckle pattern on the wall opposite. I was running the Synrad’s scan mirrors with software I'd written, while monitoring the drive signal on our new oscilloscope. Unlike Jim, I actually needed the data I was collecting, although I probably would have been scribbling it on little scraps of paper instead of an official "MARKEM CORPORATION - CONFIDENTIAL" lab notebook. Then the electronic lock on the door beeped and Al sauntered in with the new VP in tow.

Introductions were made, followed by casual tech-talk. Al introduced me as the group's mathematical physicist. "A dangerous combination," the VP commented, and we all laughed. Then he made the mistake of getting Jim revved up, and got a technically-detailed explanation of diffractive optics when a simple "Yes, but they're too expensive," would probably have sufficed. While Jim held forth, I quietly retreated to the background to complete my measurements. They were still at it when I finished, so I fiddled with the equipment to look busy until they left.

Al returned alone about an hour later, and found me and Jim lounging in the lab. "Mike was pretty impressed," he informed us in his slow, Midwestern drawl. He gave us a sly grin. "I thought you were laying it on a little thick, myself..."

Jim just laughed, but I protested. "Hey, come on, I actually needed these measurements," I said, sliding my notebook across the optical bench towards him.

"Yada yada," he retorted. "This is the first time I've actually seen your notebook here in the lab. You usually take your data on napkins and envelopes, and log it two days later. If the patent attorneys ever find out you're back-dating all your entries, they'll have a bird."

"Well," I said.

"No matter." He yawned and stretched. "Mike was impressed with the setup. He thinks that this is a direction the company should be going, and he seems comfortable leaving it in our hands. I guess that's the important thing." He looked across the lab toward the tunnel door. "About the only suggestion he had was to get that air conditioning unit out of here."

Jim and I glanced at one another.

"The AC?" I said. "But we need that. The Synrad throws off a lot of heat. Without it, it'd get up to 100° in here."

"I know that," Al said. "But he thought you might prefer not tripping over it every time you power it up."

Jim was biting his lip, and I was avoiding his look.

"He thought we might be able to commandeer a couple of old Q2000 chillers, and wondered if there might be room in that service tunnel over there," nodding toward the tunnel entrance. "So sometime when you get a chance, I'd like you two to scope out the tunnel, and... hey, what did I say??"
Last edited by sasha on January 30th, 2018, 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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STUPID BOB
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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by STUPID BOB » January 30th, 2018, 2:17 am

Eye think Eye knead to tell you that was Feynman. (shoot me now)
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sasha
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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by sasha » January 30th, 2018, 7:36 am

Hah, we were no Feynmans, that's for sure! Jim's background was in optics, while mine was in software and computer simulation, though we both have undergraduate degrees in physics. I was fond of saying that an industrial physicist was someone who was neither smart enough to become a mathematician, nor practical enough to become an engineer.
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by STUPID BOB » January 30th, 2018, 12:51 pm

I am none of the above. I do however enjoy your writing.
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sasha
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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by sasha » January 30th, 2018, 5:32 pm

Thank you! I'm glad, much appreciated.
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by still.trucking » January 31st, 2018, 3:18 am

Large text much appreciated
good story
made me homesick for my days as an organic chemists back in the sixties,
1962 or 1963
I get those years mixed up
was it the year crazy mike died?
or was it the year JFK was shot?
It was a time when I thought about Hemingway's shotgun a lot
I could not get to sleep without pretending to put it under my chin


We used to do the same when some vice president of W.R.Grace was touring the research center, but we did it with glass.
pardon the ramble
grateful for the story 8)
Last edited by still.trucking on January 31st, 2018, 3:33 am, edited 3 times in total.
"Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous." Barbara Ehrenreich

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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by still.trucking » January 31st, 2018, 3:27 am

story was a flash back for me
sorry I dumped my core on it
as if you wanted to know all that about me :oops: 8)
I am just a word kook on my days off love to watch this cursor moving across the page leaving a trail of text behind it
"Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous." Barbara Ehrenreich

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sasha
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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by sasha » January 31st, 2018, 9:48 am

no need for apologies, I'm happy the yarn meant something to you. I'll go back & edit some of my older posts into larger type in the event you want to browse through them.

I never got the hang of chemistry, esp. organic - visualizing all those chains & rings in 3D made my head hurt.
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by still.trucking » January 31st, 2018, 4:35 pm

I back edit a lot, I try not to edit anything too much, especially if someone has already replied to it. Pyhsics 101 was so boring rolling balls down inclines and plotting times on a graph. Did not get interested in physics till I smoked my brakes on Cabbage. 32 feet per second per second suddenly became very interesting.

Don't waste your time going back and editing just for me.
I would rather read your new stuff as it comes, or also your old stuff if I stumble onto one.

An honor for to write about writing with a writer like you 8)

don't mind me I am a glib son of a bitch
before you know it will be trying to sell you something :wink:
"Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous." Barbara Ehrenreich

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sasha
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Re: Why Science Nerds Should Stay Home

Post by sasha » January 31st, 2018, 6:13 pm

still.trucking wrote:
January 31st, 2018, 4:35 pm
Don't waste your time going back and editing just for me.
I would rather read your new stuff as it comes, or also your old stuff if I stumble onto one.
too late - already done. Cut & paste made short work of it. Didn't change everything, though.

still.trucking wrote:
January 31st, 2018, 4:35 pm
Pyhsics 101 was so boring rolling balls down inclines and plotting times on a graph. Did not get interested in physics till I smoked my brakes on Cabbage. 32 feet per second per second suddenly became very interesting.
Physics 625 (or whatever) was a revelation for me - got me interested in orbital mechanics - interested is an understatement. Obssessed. Music of the spheres. God's footprints. The motions of the planets and stars unpack from a single, simple differential equation.......

still.trucking wrote:
January 31st, 2018, 4:35 pm
An honor for to write about writing with a writer like you 8)
Whoa - not sure I can live up to that! Thank you.
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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