fauxklore

The main reason that I've been really busy is that I am involved with the 2nd annual Women's Storytelling Festival, which starts Friday (March 19th). Last year's festival was the last event I was at before everything shut down. This year's event is virtual, which means that any of you can attend, regardless of where you live. You can see the schedule and buy tickets at Women's Storytelling Festival. The stream will be up (for ticket holders) for two weeks so you don't have to be glued to your computer all weekend. I am emceeing the Story Swap, open to anyone who wants to tell, on Sunday morning at 10 EDT. I'm also doing a bunch of behind the scenes work during the festival. Right now, I am finishing writing up blog posts about the festival tellers, as well as compiling introductions for the emcees to use.


The other big thing I did this week was getting interviewed on Walking on the Moon on Takoma Radio. You can skip to about 8:20 p.m. and my segment ends a little after 9 p.m. Danny asked me about being a woman in engineering, but also about STEM in general. And about storytelling and how that fits in. He'd given me questions beforehand and I also gave him this video (below), which he played just a little snippet of:

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Anyway, Danny may have regretted asking me a question about any possible relation between quantum theory and Q-anon. My inherent smart ass tendencies came out. I asked the Style Invitational Loser community for help with interesting words starting with "q" to prepare. So I said "Not to be querulous but such a quixotic question makes me queasy. Quintillions of people quake and quiver to consider the qualities of of quarks and quanta, afraid to get quagmired in the quicksand of quizzical quirks. So, rather than query the quintessentials of that quandary, it would be better to quit quietly."

Back in October, fansee asked me (in response to my retirement) how I came to be a satellite systems engineer and, more specifically, about my experiences as a woman in that field. I have plenty of other catching up to do, but I’m in the mood to write about this.


As far back as I can remember, I was interested in science. As a child in the 1960’s, I had a particular interest in space. The first book I remember, from about age 5, was You Will Go to the Moon. Later on, I recall writing to NASA and getting pictures of spacecraft and planets. The first news story I remember was John Glenn orbiting the earth, And the moon landing was one of the major events of my childhood.


But, when I asked if girls could become astronauts, my mother said, “no, but maybe when you’re old enough...” For a while, after reading a biography of Maria Mitchell (part of a series my elementary school library had on childhoods of famous Americans), I thought of becoming an astronomer. Or, at least, going to Vasaar College, like she had. But then I read about Marie Curie in the back of a Classics Comics (possibly one about the story of the atom) and decided I wanted to be a chemist. I did go through other potential careers throughout elementary school and junior high, ranging from being an actress to becoming the first woman to win the Indianapolis 500. But I pretty much stuck to chemistry as the plan. For a while, I specifically wanted to be an analytical chemist for the police department, like Barry Allen (the alter ego of The Flash), which would also solve the problem of how I would get super powers without having been born on Krypton or being an Amazon princess. By high school, I was primarily interested in biochemistry and, specifically, neurochemistry.


That pretty much continued to be the plan. I did well in chemistry class (and other science classes). I also went to two National Science Foundation programs. The Columbia University Science Honors Program was held on Saturdays and I spent 3 years taking the train into the city (and the subway uptown) for it. I took a wide range of classes, not just biochemistry related. I remember one about statistics for psychology, one on elementary particle physics, and a biochemistry class where we extracted DNA - something far more exciting in 1975 than it would be now. There were also afternoon lectures a few times each semester, with the most memorable of those having to do with topology. There were also social benefits, including meeting my first real boyfriend. When there weren’t afternoon lectures, he and I hung out in the city and perpetrated public displays of affection in Central Park. But that’s a whole other story. (Before I met him, I sometimes went to the headquarters of the socialist Zionist group that ran a summer camp I’d gone to for a couple of summers and spent the afternoon handing out leaflets on the street.)


The other NSF program was the Program in Biochemistry (PIB), the summer after my junior year of high school. It was held at the Loomis-Chaffee School in Connecticut and was a mixture of lectures and research projects in small groups. I had actually spent the previous summer taking a summer school class (at my high school) on biochemistry research, which I remember as being almost entirely focused on individual projects, with a few field trips thrown in. I did a project in which I injected the nerves of clams (which are big red threads) with neurotransmitters. I don’t remember what I was trying to prove. As for the field trips. we did one or two to various institutions within a couple of hours of our school. I know we went at least once to Waldemar, which was a medical research facility that had its own summer program for high school students. And I know we went to the Coney Island Aquarium, but I don’t remember if that was an official event.


Anyway, PIB was a fun and intense summer. We took pride in sleep deprivation and people signed up for one hour naps on the sofa in the lounge, for example. We learned how to “sacrifice” mice and grind up their livers in a blender and an unlucky member of my team got a taste when mouth pipetting some of the resulting liquid. We did have papers to write and the various instructors (who were upperclassmen at prestigious universities; the head of my team was a junior at Harvard, if I recall correctly) graded them according to their own systems. There was one instructor who favored the use of classical compositions as grades. To this day, I have no idea whether “Glinka’s Summer Night in Madrid” was or was not a good grade. We also had various extracurricular trips. I know I went to concerts at Tanglewood a few times. There were tours of various colleges. And there was a trip to New York to see Equus on Broadway.


So, when I was applying to colleges, I was still planning to be a chemistry major. But my brother was busily setting a Michigan State record for changing majors and someone I knew from high school was rethinking his plan to major in math at Yale. I chose MIT over Yale largely because I figured that, if I did change my mind about my major, I would still want to do something scientific.


Freshman year included 5.41, which was an Intro to Organic Chemistry class. I was reasonably well prepared and went on the next semester to the next class, 5.42. (I was also taking a lab class.) I discovered that, while I could think of lots of reactions that could happen, I often had no idea which one would happen. More significantly, I was not enjoying either of those two classes. At the same time, I read about some work that people in the mechanical engineering department were doing on prosthetics that used the body’s nervous system. That sounded fascinating and I looked further at ME as a major. (Or, in MIT lingo, Course 2.) The biggest advantage is that it would give me a broad engineering background, meaning I didn’t really have to make up my mind. There was a program (2A) that let you design your own major within the ME department and I used that to design what was, essentially, a biomedical engineering major.


One of the first classes I took was 2.02, Introduction to System Dynamics. This was focused on modeling and it just clicked with my desire to view the world as simple. There were a few times that I rushed back to my dorm room after class to work on a problem set right away to see if it all made as much sense as I thought it did. (I assure you that was not normal behavior for me.) Anyway, people said that if I liked that class, I should take 2.14, which was Introduction to Control Systems. I did and it continued to click with me. So I kept taking classes in system dynamics and controls and enjoying them. And I pursued that into grad school (at UC Berkeley).


While I was in grad school, I got a fellowship from NASA, which came about mostly because one of my professors knew somebody and helped me write the application. When I was nearing completing my doctorate and was job hunting, I did look at things in various industries, but most of the interesting controls issues were in the aerospace industry. I went to work at The Aerospace Corporation (aka The Circle-A Ranch) largely because it offered the opportunity to work across a wide range of systems. And that worked out we’ll for me, obviously, since I stayed there (in various jobs) for 35 years.



This has been fairly long and I haven’t gotten to writing about the specific issue of being a woman in the field. The short version is that I certainly had to deal with individual assholes, but I was always able to find support. As an undergrad at MIT, I chose to live in an all-women’s dorm, partly to have other women to vent to. Most of that was in the form of mircroaggressions, e.g. the instructor who headed a research project I worked on who kept a ruler with Playboy pictures on his desk or another professor who would make comments like “those co-eds are always turning in things late.” The most egregious example was a professor who had started every lecture for years by addressing the class as “:Gentlemen.” I was the only girl in the class and he’d then start with “Gentlemen,…and Miss Nadel.” On the plus side, he definitely knew who I was and I did well in his class. (I am fairly sure he was entirely unconscious of why this was annoying.) I should also mention that my undergrad advisor was a woman.


In grad school, I remember a reception where our department head proudly announced that he had doubled the number of women on the department faculty. They’d hired one person. (They did hire a couple more while I was still there.) But there were a couple of other women working on Ph.D.s and, even though we were in different subfields, we often had coffee together.


Job hunting was another story. A few places made a point of having me talk with a token woman in their group. More than one interviewer expressed surprise at seeing a female job candidate. One organization even sent me a thank you letter addressed to “Mr. Nadel” after my interview.


Circle-A was pretty good from that standpoint. Yes, I often found myself counting the number of women in the room at meetings (which included government and contractor employees, too), but I can think of only a handful of inappropriate comments. I do know of one woman whose (female) boss told her she should wear makeup. And I’ve heard of a few incidents of sexual harassment. On the plus side, we did have an African-American woman as our CEO for several years.


Overall, I had a career that suited me well.

Work: I am frustrated with the slow pace of decision making, which is keeping me from getting work done on updating a plan that depends on a senior level decision. There’s not much I can do about it, but that doesn’t make it less annoying.

I have plenty of other things to get done, but I really want to check this off.


Non-work: I have continued to be busy. I went to another Profs and Pints talk – on epidemics. I was glad that the focus was more on polio than on the Spanish flu, and there were a lot of interesting parallels to the current situation, e.g. equipment shortages. I thought some of the social distancing measures of the time were also interesting. There were towns that completely banned children, for example.

I also called into one storytelling show, participated in a story swap (and have the story I told recorded), and recorded another (new) story. It is very weird to do this, since, without an audience I can hear (they are muted on zoom calls), it is hard to judge my pacing. I played board games a couple of times. I went to a little bit of Awesome Con on-line, mostly to listen to one panel (on Women of Color in Science Fiction) and to participate in a trivia contest, which was too pop-culture heavy for me. I also listened to some folk music (Scottish traditional music plus John McCutcheon) live on-line. And I have hours of stuff saved to watch later.

Last night a zoom call with friends got weird when two people had a kerfuffle over whether or not it was okay to talk about politics. That should really have been sorted out beforehand, but it ended with both of the people involved leaving.


Shopping: I was able to buy toilet paper at Wegman’s yesterday. I was down to the last couple of rolls, so coming home with a 12 pack was quite a relief. I also have fresh vegetables and fruit again. (People usually say fruits and veggies in that order. I wonder why?) And yes, it is pathetic that this is exciting.




Shameless Self-Promotion Department: One advantage of things being on-line is the ability to go to non-local events. So I can encourage you all to check out the storytelling show I am part of on Friday May 8th at 8 p.m. My story involves Irene’s Beauty Salon, the permanent press setting on an iron, alternative uses for orange juice cans, and why my spirit animal is the alpaca. I am up first, so make sure to be on time!
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For tickets see the Better Said Than Done website.

Celebrity Death Watch: First, here’s a minor addition to the last edition of Celebrity Death Watch. I had completely forgotten that James Lipton also wrote the book An Exaltation of Larks. That’s a collection of terms for groups of things, primarily animals. My personal favorite is “a murder of crows.”

As for people who have died since the last time I did one of these wrap-ups, Laura Caldwell wrote both chick lit and mysteries. Barbara Neely wrote African-American themed mysteries. Rosalind Walter was the original Rosie the Riveter. McCoy Tyner was a jazz pianist. Tom Turnipseed was a South Carolina politician who I am noting primarily because he had such a wonderful name. Henri Richard was a hall-of-fame hockey player. David Rainford was a British quiz show contestant. Mart Crowley wrote The Boys in the Band, which is considered a break-through gay-themed play. Max van Sydow had a prolific acting career. Richard K. Guy was a British mathematician. Daniel Greenberg was a science journalist. Anton Coppola was an orchestra conductor. Mal Sharpe conducted prank “man on the street” interviews for radio and television in San Francisco. Genesis P-Orridge was an experimental / industrial musician and performance artist. Doriot Anthony Dwyer was one of the first women to be a principal chair of a major American orchestra, having been appointed first flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1952. Suzy Delair was a French actress. Stuart Whitman was a film and television actor, who co-starred in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, which has the distinction of being the first film I ever saw in a movie theatre. Menachem Friedman was a sociologist who wrote about Haredi Judaism. Betty Williams won a Nobel peace prize for her work in trying to end The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Gerald Freedman was the first American invited to direct a play at the Globe Theatre in London. Alfred Worden was an astronaut. Catherine Hamlin co-founded a hospital in Ethiopia to treat women with fistula from childbirth. Richard Kline directed television game shows such as Joker’s Wild. Sol Kerzner developed the Sun hotels and casinos in South Africa and thereabouts. Eric Weissberg was a musician, best known for “Dueling Banjos.” Julie Felix was a folk singer who was mostly known for performing on British television. Walter Robb was a GE executive who owned the Albany River Rats minor league hockey team. David Collings was a British actor who appeared in a lot of science fiction shows. Manu Dibango was a Cameroonian saxophonist.

Javier Perez de Cueller was the Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1982 until 1991. He was on my ghoul pool list two years ago, which gets me nada.

Troy Collings ran a travel company that specialized in sending people with no sense to dangerous places. For example, he arranged Otto Warmbier’s trip to North Korea. Collings allegedly died of a heart attack (at age 33) but I am skeptical.

John Seward Johnson II was a sculptor. He was known for hyper-realistic works and founded Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey. D.C. area residents know him best for The Awakening, which used to be at Hains Point and is now at National Harbor.

Lyle Waggoner was an actor who appeared on The Carol Burnett Show and later played Steve Trevor on Wonder Woman. He also made a lot of money by leasing trailers for use on studio lots. He was on my back-up list for the ghoul pool, which is, apparently, where people go to die, while the ones on my actual list linger on and on.

Kenny Rogers was a country singer. I assume you didn’t need me to tell you that. Nor do you need me to tell you that his most famous song was “The Gambler.” Given the state of the world, I guess you could say he knew when to fold them.

Terrence McNally was a playwright, which is quite an understatement given that he won a lifetime achievement Tony and numerous other awards. He wrote plays (e.g. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Master Class) and libretti for musicals (including several for Kander and Ebb musicals, e.g. Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Rink, and The Visit).

Cabin Fever: Last week started with my company recommending working from home. By Thursday, it became mandatory. Our military customers are requiring flag-level permission to go to the office, which is limited to mission essential activities, like supporting a launch. This doesn’t have a huge impact on me, since I spend most of my time calling into to meetings and then writing emails about what happened at those meetings. I am giving myself a half-hour each morning and each evening to read, which I am counting as my commute time even though I am only commuting a few steps from my bedroom to my dining room, instead of riding the metro. (It should be 45 minutes, but I am also sleeping a bit later.)

The bigger impact to my normal life is that everything is canceled for months to come. A few things might get rescheduled for later this year, while others have already been rescheduled to future years. One of my friends has long claimed that if I don’t have at least 6 things on my calendar in a given month, that month won’t exist. So, I guess April, May, June, and July of 2020 are completely imaginary. And possibly longer, but at least one event in August is not canceled. Yet.

I have been out twice to do grocery shopping. The one thing I need that I haven’t been able to get is paper towels. I am not in dire need yet, but I am using the last roll now. (I do also have about a half a package of paper napkins. If I had thought ahead, I could have brought home the absurd supply of napkins I have in my office.) I did have to go to a few stores before finding yeast and eggs. Fresh produce hasn’t been a problem to buy, however. The trickiness is that Passover is approaching and I have to balance having supplies with cleaning out pantries for that. I used up the last of the barley I had on hand in making bean and barley soup on Sunday evening. I have been enjoying pancakes (with confectioner’s sugar and lemon juice) for breakfast some mornings. I have some oats to use up, which I think are going to go into muffins if I can find the recipe I had in mind for them. Alternatively, I could wait until the weekend and make Donegal oatcakes, which take more time than I am willing to spend on a weekday.

I also want to mention all the streaming entertainment out there. I’ve particularly enjoyed several shows from the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, including one of Allan Sherman songs. I am planning on giving them a nice donation.

American Community Survey: This is a long form that the U.S. Census Bureau does every year and my address got randomly selected for this year. You answer a lot of nosy questions on-line. They claim it should take 40 minutes to do. Ha! It takes me more than 40 minutes to find my last gas bill and electric bill (the amounts of which they want to know) because I pay those automagically and only look at them a couple of times a year. And isn’t January a silly time to ask about your income last year and how much you got in interest and dividends, given that most documentation of that stuff comes at the very end of January and into February? I also don’t know things like how many units are in my condo complex and when it was built and what my real estate taxes are without doing a lot of searching. Well, I gave it my best guesses, but it was annoying.


Around the Neighborhood – Work Edition: While I was away, more places near work closed. Cosi is the biggest loss, as it had been the closest place to get something to eat without having to go outside. Apparently, another eatery reachable by indoor paths also closed, but I haven’t gone down that way since I’ve been back. The library branch had always been a pop-up, as had one take-out food place. But the key point is that there are fewer and fewer options around.


Around the Neighborhood – Home Edition: On my way to book club last week, I noticed a new Indian grocery store on Route 50. I’ll have to find some time to check it out.


Matchbox: I went out to dinner with flyertalk friends last night at Matchbox in Pentagon City. I got an Aslin Trite (nicely hoppy and slightly herbal beer) and a salad with seared tuna. That was a pretty good meal. But several people got pizzas, which looked extremely good, so I’ll keep that in mind if we go there again. We also had lots of travel-related conversation.


New Work Phone… NOT: They’re doing a hardware refresh and we are supposed to get new iphones. The previous time they did this, they sent out detailed instructions on what to do in advance. This time, they sent a completely useless link, which essentially said that it is okay to back up your photos to the cloud. (I actually back up my iphone photos to google photos, but that is beside the point.)

What I hadn’t realized is that the default for back-ups does not include messages. This is a simple thing to fix, had I but known. Anyway, in the course of trying to transfer my messages from the old phone to the new one, various things went wrong, eventually resulting in the new phone getting bricked. So I will have to go through this whole ordeal again some time next week.


Good Political News: Virginia has ratified the Equal Rights Amendment!


Fun Fact of the Day: The Space Force is prohibited by law from having a band. (Basically, Congress doesn’t want to have to pay Space Saxophonists and Space Trumpeters and so on. Given that my great-uncle did his World War II military service in an Army band in New Jersey, I am particularly amused by this.)

Dinner in Sweden: The MIT Club of Washington had its annual meeting at the House of Sweden last night. The buffet dinner had reasonable variety and everything was quite tasty. The menu included roasted vegetable grain salad, potato salad with herbs, green salad, turkey meatballs with lingonberry sauce, salmon with cucumber and tartar sauce, assorted breads, and cake with berries. There was also an open bar, though I limited myself to one glass of sauvignon blanc.

Susan Hockfield (former president of MIT) was the keynote speaker and discussed her new book, The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution. She gave examples of how biology is influencing development of technology for addressing several problems, including medicine (specifically cancer detection using nanoparticles), energy (virus-built batteries), and protein-based water purification. I’ve heard her speak a few times before and she is always informative and engaging.

We also got to go up to the roof deck of the embassy afterwards, which has amazing views over the Potomac. All in all, it was quite a lovely evening. There are times when I think about how nice a life I have and this was definitely one of those.

Sources of Stress: To make sure the evil eye doesn’t retaliate for my smugness about a good life, I just spent over an hour wrestling with our on-line tool for doing our end of week reports. And the only person who can help anyone with it is out today.

Also, a four game series between my Red Sox and the Source of All Evil in the Universe is starting tonight. In accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Politics, Economics, and the American League East, the world is in considerable danger.

I am still feeling stressed and overwhelmed. That is partly due to having a lot to do at work, including one project that is: 1) being run by somebody who isn’t qualified to shine my shoes and 2) for which the two of us doing all the real work will not get the credit for political reasons. There is also a big meeting I’ll be at next week, which will end too late on Friday for me to fly home that day, making it impossible for me to get to an event I’d really like to go to on Saturday. On top of the work stress, I am still scrambling around to find some paperwork I need to file this week (because I won’t be around next week). And at least three of my friends have had recent mental health crises, with two of those involving hospitalization. I am functioning reasonably well, but I am exhausted. The net result is that I spent most of the past weekend In a state of suspended animation, i.e. do a few household things, take a nap, lather, rinse, repeat.

Corporate News: I’d be a bit more convinced about my company placing fairly high on a list of best employers of our size if the listing didn’t show our CEO as the one who retired over 2 years ago.

Don’t Analyze This Dream: The first half of this dream involved watching an hour-long romance musical on television, possibly on youtube. The plot had something to do with a woman looking for love and attending the wedding of her friends. Later on, she was kissing their child and I decided she was waiting for the kid to grow up to be her partner. Then, somehow the scene switched to me looking out a window in Philadelphia at a Chasidic family leaving a synagogue.

Pesach: My father has been gone for well over 30 years, but I particularly miss him when it comes to the Passover seder. He didn’t let his lack of a good singing voice stop him from singing every verse of every song, and it’s only as an adult that I think that Grandpa (who had an excellent voice) must have turned off his hearing aid in order to deal with that. And, who knew? It turns out to be possible to hide the afikomen somewhere other than on top of the refrigerator.

I should also note a break from personal tradition this year. I bring string cheese, matzoh, and fruit to work for lunch. But this year I am eating clementines instead of grapes. (And, by the way, clementine has 4 syllables. It sort of rhymes with ballerina.)

I've been working on a project which has a deadline at the end of March. For various reasons I won't go into publicly, the very first thing the people heading the project did was request an extension to the end of June.

We heard today that we may not get that extension.

We've been having three not horribly productive meetings a week. At today's meeting we heard (not quite verbatim but close) "If we don't get the extension, we'll have to have more meetings."

Because, yeah, right, that's going to help.

Celebrity Death Watch: Philip Bosco was an actor, who won a Tony for his performance in Lend Me a Tenor. Jael Strauss was a fashion model. Les Kinsolving was the first White House correspondent to ask questions about the HIV/AIDS epidemic (during the Reagan administration). Julia Vinograd, known as the Bubble Lady, was a street poet in Berkeley. Harry Shlaudeman was a diplomat who served as ambassador to a number of Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Nicaragua. Pete Shelley cofounded and was the lead singer of the Buzzcocks. Victor Hayden, known as The Mascara Snake, was an artist and perfomed with Captain Beefheart. Rosanell Eaton was a civil rights activist. Evelyn Berezin designed the first word processor and worked on computer systems for airline reservations. Alvin Epstein was an actor and director, best known as something of a specialist in the works of Samuel Beckett. Rob DesHotel was a television writer and producer who worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer among other shows. Jacques Gansler was the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics from 1997 to 2001. Bob Bryan was the co-creator, with Marshall Dodge, of Bert & I, a series of humorous stories about a couple of fishermen in Maine. Nancy Wilson was a jazz singer. Patricia Marshall was an actress, best known for her roles in Good News and The Pajama Game. She was also the widow of playwright and screenwriter Larry Gelbart. Joan Steinbrenner was the widow of George Steinbrenner and got involved in the business aspects of the New York Yankees. Jerry Chestnut wrote country songs. Colin Kroll was the founder of Vine and HQ Trivia.

Melvin Dummar claimed to be an heir to Howard Hughes’s estate. His story is well known as the basis for the movie, Melvin and Howard.

Penny Marshall was an actress (best known for Laverne and Shirley) and director. She was one of the first women to become well known as a director. In particular, she directed my second favorite movie of all time, A League of Their Own.

Galt MacDermot wrote several musicals, notably Hair and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Holiday Party: Today was the holiday party at work. This year, they went with somewhat Mediterranean catering, with hummus, grilled vegetables, and various grilled protein things, including salmon. There was also salad and cheese and crackers and fruit. And several desserts, including chocolate cake. This fit in well with my contribution to the white elephant gift exchange, which was a Turkish tea set, I had gotten as a gift from a hotel in Istanbul (two plastic cups, with saucers and spoons, plus powdered apple tea). I supplemented that with a Starbucks gift card. I ended up being the last to choose, so I ended up choosing to take a stack of boxes of Godiva chocolate truffles. At least one of those boxes will go with me to book club tomorrow.

Speaking of Work: If it weren’t for the telephone, I would get so much more done. I have been trying to write up notes from last week’s conference, but I keep getting interrupted. Tomorrow will be even worse, as most of the day will be occupied with a briefing on a study we’ve had going on. I should probably read some of the several slide packages in the read ahead, but I am not sure I can stay awake through that.

I had a 90-minute meeting yesterday in which approximately 80 minutes were dedicated to arguing about the definition of one word. The person running the meeting had compiled a list of definitions for that word (and some related terms) from about a dozen source documents - and failed to include the single relevant document that solved the whole problem.

A number of years ago, I worked with somebody who would frequently go to a room where a meeting was taking place, put down a tall stack of books and papers on a desk or table, hang his suit jacket on the back of a chair, and leave. Then he would write an item in our end of week report that claimed he had attended the meeting. Another colleague and I had a running joke that these items should say that his jacket attended the meeting. (By the way, he also had a remarkable talent for being out sick on Mondays and Fridays. As a rule of thumb, this suggests alcohol or drug abuse.)

I mention this because, in writing up my notes about yesterday’s brain drain, I mentioned that a particular organization was not represented. I got an email back from a colleague saying he thought he had heard someone from that organization there. But, you know who else wasn’t there? That’s right - the colleague who wrote that email.

It is 644 days until my intended retirement date. That assumes I don’t strangle anyone in the meantime.