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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
First things first, and that’s Secondhand SCIENCE. This time, we’re talking about apoptosis.
We’re not always pronouncing it the same way, and we probably don’t spell it the same way twice. But that’s what we’re talking about. It’s the ptosis with the mostest.)
I’m struggling with tea.
Not all tea. Just office tea. And only bad office tea, at that. I’ll explain.
Where I work, we have a break room. The company is kind enough to provide snacks and fruit and whatever off-brand Cheeto-like puffs qualify as.
(Flavored styrofoam? Orange chalk dust? Chemical weapons?)
There’s also a water cooler — or bubblah, in Boston-ese — which I take advantage of a couple of times a day.
(Which is to say, I get a couple of cups of water. Nobody’s “taking advantage of” that water cooler in the break room, if you know what I’m saying.
At least, I hope not. The sloshing mess alone would be ridiculous.)
“If you water down water, all you get is more water. It’s like the Hootie and the Blowfish of the potable beverage world.”
Anyway, I drink the water — but I get bored with water, because it’s water. I like strong tastes and bold flavors. Spicy food. Hoppy beers. Coffee so black it exerts a small gravitational pull. You only live once; I say, who wants to go out with a pristine intestinal tract? That’s just a waste of good colon, right there.
So water is fine, but it’s obviously not interesting. Water is the very definition of bland. If you water down water, all you get is more water. It’s like the Hootie and the Blowfish of the potable beverage world.
So I started making tea. Or rather, TEA.
See, there are two ways in this break room to prepare tea. The first, which tea fans, cucumber sandwich eaters and citizens of the British Isles would no doubt prefer, involves steeping tea bags in hot water.
(Which you can get straight from the bubblah! Because it’s duah-tempahtuah, that thing. That’s wicked pissah, kid!)
If you make a strong choice and use enough tea bags — oh, say, three for a twelve-ounce cup — then you’ll get a nice, flavorful, intense cup of tea.
However.
It’ll also take five minutes or more to steep — “but I’m thirsty noooooow” — and results in a drink that’s quite hot. Tongue-burningly so, and that adds more hassle. Especially now that it’s fricking June, and we’re not fighting our way through polar bears and frostbite to get into the damned office. It’s eighty degrees outside; why the hell would I want a hundred and eighty more in my mouth?
I wouldn’t. So I moved over to the second, lazy method of making tea, which involves opening a little packet of powdered tea dust — or off-brand Cheeto scrapings, for all I know — and stirring the contents into a cup of cold water.
Is that “proper” tea? No. Is it “good” tea? No. Does it taste more interesting than water, which is the whole point of this ridiculous endeavor?
Weeeeeell. That depends.
Because at first, I read the labels on these little one-serving packets of tea dander, and the labels said to dissolve the contents into 20 ounces of water. I tried that. And I got some semblance of something that maybe one day in the past brushed up against tea, or maybe had worn a pair of pants after tea had been in them. But I wouldn’t call it “tea”. And certainly not TEA, which is what I really wanted.
So I downsized. I found if I stirred that same bit of fluff into 12 ounces of water, the ratio worked out well enough to resemble tea. It even bordered on TEA, which I could live with, and so planned to continue this system for the foreseeable future.
Which turned out to be about four days, when we ran out of tea powder sleeves. So for the next week, no tea. I tried making off-brand Cheeto water, but it wasn’t the same. And my orange lips were beginning to freak people out. So, no tea.
But then. This week, someone restocked the break room, and that’s where my struggles began. Because they didn’t replace the single-serving leaf-dirt sleeves; instead, they brought in bigger sleeves, meant to flavor something like a gallon of water at a time. I didn’t notice the difference right away, and used one as I normally would.
That didn’t make tea. Nor did it make TEA.
That shit made TEEEEEEEEEEEA.
I drank it, but it was hours before I was right again. It felt like someone’s oolong was all crammed up in my orange pekoe. Not cool.
I’ve tried making more — using only part of the packet at a time — but it’s not an exact science. I’m not going to measure out individual tea grains, so all I can do is pour out what I think is half, or a third, or a quarter of the sleeve. Sometimes I get tea. Sometimes Teeeeea? Occasionally tea. But very rarely do I get TEA, which is what I actually want.
In a lifetime mostly spent knowing exactly how Arthur Dent feels, now I know exactly how Arthur Dent feels.
I feel like the best option is just switching over to dry martinis, which turn out to be way less fiddly to make and almost never taste like water. I might not get any work done, but at least I’ll be passed out at my desk, instead of sitting in the lunchroom for four hours at a time, microdosing dirt into water like some kind of modern-day deranged beverage alchemist.
Yeah. Definitely better.
Permalink | No Comments(The clock on the wall says it’s science time. Secondhand SCIENCE time!
That’s not really an appropriate thing for a clock to say. I should probably get that fixed. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s scientific spectacular, all about Jeans instability. Keep it in yer pants, people. Science!)
I have a new time sink. It’s always been there at a low level, but lately it’s taking up much more of my time, and eventually I’ll have to make an adjustment. The issue?
LinkedIn requests from people I don’t recognize.
I don’t know why these things are suddenly streaming into my inbox, but the volume has gone way up in the last few weeks. Maybe because it’s summer. Maybe my company is in trouble, and no one’s telling me. Or maybe my boss is mad at me, and is telling everybody.
(Though that still wouldn’t explain why people would want to connect, out of the blue. Just to watch the eventual train wreck?
That ain’t right. Keep yer schadenfreude outta my employment status, munchos.)
“Why is the sky blue? What do birds dream about? And who’s this random goober in a lopsided tie in my inbox?”
Of course, the real problem is my cripplingly terrible memory. Every time I get an email that some new person wants to bump rolodexes, I put the name in one of two bins:
1. People I’ve worked with, talked to, emailed, hired, fired, interviewed, lived with and/or gotten drunk with in the past two months; or
2. STRANGER DANGER!
I have very little recall power for people. It’s not their fault. It’s almost certainly my fault, but I’m still going to take the hand-wavy hippie way out and say: it just is. Why is the sky blue? What do birds dream about? And who’s this random goober in a lopsided tie in my inbox?
These are unanswerable questions. Mysteries of nature, for true.
The fact remains: I’m bad with faces, and even worse with names. All my memory cells are busy, apparently, storing up old Simpsons quotes and lyrics to R.E.M. songs.
(Which are mostly gibberish, but if I can’t belt out Driver 8 in the shower on a Tuesday morning, then what the hell’s the point of getting up at all? Contributing to society? Preventing bedsores? Going to the office to see Whoshisface and Whatchamacallher, and that other guy who has the thing, like on his face, but not a mole, the other kind of thing?
Pfffft.)
And that’s the rub. If I knew these random requests really were random requests, I could ignore them. Just delete them, forget the emails ever darkened my inbox and get back to the more important things in life. Like the flashcards I made to learn who’s who in the lunch room.
But no. There’s always some scrap of a connection, some possible thread that makes me think that I know — no, that I should know — this person reaching out to me over the interwebs. Because it would be rude to ignore an old friend who might be looking for a job, or catching up with colleagues. And often, at first glance I can’t tell the difference.
And so I Google.
I’m no internet stalker. But I’ve gotten pretty damned good at finding information about miscellaneous people on the web — because I have to, because mostly-miscellaneous people on the web keep sending me LinkedIn requests. And I don’t just have to learn enough to decide that I know someone. No, no. That would be too easy. I have to learn enough about these people to be absolutely certain that I don’t know them, so I can safely trash their requests and get on with my feeble-brained absentminded life.
Did I forget we went to college together? Or maybe you worked three cubicles over at that company three jobs ago? Was I the third baseman on your softball team? Have you bailed me out of jail? ARE YOU MY DADDY?!
I have to answer all of these questions, and dozens more, all in the negative, before I’m satisfied that it’s just some basement-dwelling yahoo with too much time on his — or her — hands, who’s finally decided it’d be fun to ping every single person LinkedIn suggests they might know. A request from the third cousin of my boss’ neighbor’s barber, I can happily shitcan. Someone closer to home (if still out of mind) — not so much.
And just to twist the knife a smidgen deeper, I can’t gather intel from the one place that I know is likely to have detailed dirt on these people: LinkedIn. Because if I visit their LinkedIn page, LinkedIn will tell them I visited, and then they’ll know I got their request and that I’m actively deciding I don’t want to associate with them.
Which I don’t. And honestly, I’m pretty active about it.
But I don’t want them to know that. God. How embarrassing.
No. Much better that I should surreptitiously scour the internet for hours, searching every scrap of information I can find using the scant few clues provided in the LinkedIn email. That’s the proper way to handle these situations.
(Says the little voice in my head. Who I’m beginning to suspect is less “Miss Manners”, and more “Charlie Manson”.)
So. Random LinkedIn requests. Basically the sixth circle of hell for people with an internet connection, poor memory and whatever ridiculous social disorder I just described.
Kinda takes all the fun out of schlepping to an office every day, dunnit?
Permalink | No Comments(Secondhand SCIENCE, baby — catch the fever!
Well, don’t actually catch a fever. That would be uncomfortable. But swing over and see this week’s science-down, all about viroids. Which could give you a fever — but probably only if you’re a potato. Check it out.)
Since it’s not remotely what I’m supposed to be working on right now, this is clearly the only project I’m able to focus on: a modernized parody version of this 35-year-old song by the Cure:
I’d be a great poster child for Ritalin — if I were still a child, and if I ever looked good on a poster. Anyway, Cure this, if you can:
BOYS DON’T SQUEE
I would say, “my bad, wow”
If I sensed that you would stay with me.
But I see you mad now;
You are all scrunched up,
Like, O-M-G.
I try to say, “whatevs, girl”,
Don’t want to call you a B.
How can I say, “whatevs, girl”
When you keep callin’ me “twee”?
‘Cause boys don’t squee.
Boys don’t squee.
Yeah, I broke down in your crib
When you brought out your
Bichon frise.
He was so cute in his bib,
I couldn’t hold my gleeful squees.
So now your friends laugh about it,
Throwing shade till my ears bleed.
Even you laugh about it,
That noise I totes do not need.
‘Cause boys don’t squee.
Boys don’t squee.
I would tell you that I’ll sack up;
Be the man that you prefer.
But my voice will climb back up
Next time I peep your ball of fur.
I get excited,
not like a BOSS;
If I could fight it,
Everything would be awesomesauce.
Now I don’t know what it would take
For us to repair our “we”.
How can I keep from breaking?
You’re twice as manly as me.
‘Cause boys don’t squee.
Boys don’t squee.
Boys. Don’t. Squee.
(News, news, news! Like clockwork, Secondhand SCIENCE marches on. This week’s hot science take is on laser capture microdissection, which is at least as awesome as it sounds, probably.
Also, I’m uber-pleased to report that a short play that Jenn Dlugos and I wrote has been accepted by Theater@First in Somerville for their “Fractured Fairy Tales” festival this summer. Come out for all the plays, which are sure to be fantastic — and if you’re local (and you hurry), you can even audition for a part!
Finally, there’s another project Jenn and I (and now, a whole host of hilarious people) have been working on, Magicland. It’s not just Toledo, Ohio’s third- (or fifth-, or ninth-)favorite local family-owned lizard-themed 24-hour amusement park. It’s also a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, an upcoming web series, and possibly more. Stay tuned, and don’t miss out on the magic!)
Apparently, I give off a certain vibe.
I guess that’s okay. It’s better than giving off a certain odor, anyway. Or a certain electric shock, which would also probably be frowned upon.
I’ve been aware of this vibe for a while. It’s a sort of “hey, man, don’t complicate me with societal routines and conventions and stuff” kind of vibe, and frankly, I don’t mind emanating that a little bit. If I could have oozed a similar sentiment in the direction of certain former bosses and corporate event planners and professors scheduling 8am classes, my early adult years might have gone a little smoother.
(Of course, there’s always the possibility I was vibing at those people, and they just didn’t care. If I’m in public before nine in the morning, who knows what the hell I’m oozing?)
Anyway, there are a lot of “norms” I just don’t get. I’m not trying to be a dick about them — unless it’s before 9am; I think we’ve established my position on that — but I truly just don’t understand the rationale.
“You might as well strap Homer Simpson around your neck.”
Neckties, for instance. Those are preposterous. And not just because they’re “formal”. At least a suit jacket has pockets for stuff and keeps you warm in the winter, maybe. Ties have no purpose. They exist only to choke you and to attract mustard and gravy stains. You might as well strap Homer Simpson around your neck.
Ditto for birthdays. Those were great as a kid, sure. But the whole concept is a little wacky. We celebrate something that every one of us did, but we had no part in aiding and were too young to remember. And we commemorate the event every time the calendar says a certain day, which it only does because we came up with this oddball system of telling time with twelve sets of mostly 30-ish days, but not always, and we have to cram an extra in every four years or eventually Christmas falls in the summer. Which is probably more appropriate, but nobody’s interested in that because Santa would sweat his bowlful-of-ass off in the middle of August. Wacky.
Then there’s the workday. Eighty percent of the people with office jobs setting the same hours, so they can all sit alone in cubicles for most of the day, then herd into a conference room for an occasional meeting. Or a TPS report update. Or somebody’s birthday.
For the past several years, I’ve had the tremendous good fortune to enjoy flexibility in these areas, and a few bewildering others. My particular profession is fairly free of dress codes, and, within reason, able to support flexible schedules.
(They haven’t done away with birthdays, but nobody’s perfect. And we all know corporate birthday acknowledgements only exist as an excuse to eat afternoon cake. Which I totally understand.
I mean, the British just called it “tea time” and did away with the charade, rather than making sure every company hired someone with every possible birthday on the calendar. That seems cleaner, but what do I know? I don’t even wear ties to work.)
Anyway, I can’t exactly complain. And I don’t! I’ve got it pretty good in terms of maneuvering around the things that don’t make much sense. And I even follow a few conventions by self-policing — because you can’t be a complete anarchist about these things, or people will start to whisper about you. And since you don’t go to the birthday meetings in the conference room, you won’t even realize. Very dangerous.
Still, I must give off the vibe of having little patience for unexamined routines, because every once in a while someone will just assume I don’t follow any of them. Like earlier this week, when I was walking into work and ran into a fellow employee coming out of the office.
(Because we work on different schedules. Praise current flexible employer!)
He noted that it was finally getting warm around Boston again, and as he went on his merry way, he remarked in passing:
“Guess you’ll be back to wearing shorts soon, eh?”
Now, that’s not an entirely out of place comment. I’ve worked at jobs where I’ve worn shorts in the summer. I and many of the other employees, in fact. It’s another thing that to me just makes sense: if it’s really hot, and you’re not flinging dangerous chemicals or bacteria or saw blades around, then what’s the point of long pants, really? This isn’t Wall Street. Be comfortable. Do work. Breathe a little cooler; life is short(s).
However.
I started at this company a few years ago, in the winter. And — outside the odd outfit change to hit the gym or a lunchtime jog — I’ve never seen anyone at this place wearing shorts. I watched, that first year, waiting to see whether shorts would emerge. Emerge they did not. So I didn’t wear mine. I’m quite certain of this. I have the ass sweat to prove it.
So I can say with confidence that this coworker who commented has never once seen me in a pair of shorts. And yet, the assumption is, I’ll soon be (“back”) into them, as the temperature climbs. Why? Because I’ve got the vibe.
I think I’m okay with that. As misconceptions go, I’m pretty fine if all the ones out there are about things that I would do, but I just haven’t happened to have done. It sure beats the hell out of people thinking I’m an Armani hound. Or a morning person. Or itching to sing them “Happy Birthday” in Auxiliary Conference Room B.
Honestly, most of the cakes are even store-bought. What’s the appeal, man?
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