The Eight Hour Meeting

As is the case with most weeks, this week was pretty much completely normal. Pokemon Go was probably the most exciting thing of the week, and that is not saying much. After a long slow climb, we were able to level up in Pokemon Go. Since we do not devote very much energy to this game as of late, our progress has been rather slow.  For over a month now, we have been saving up our coins in the game to buy some magic egg and evolve a whole bunch of our Pokemon all at once. This in turn allowed us to quickly level up and become Jedi Masters/Pokemon Sensei.

Our hope is to out wait everyone else who is still playing Pokemon Go (which has to be like what, 40 people, right?) then take over everything. "Slow and steady wins the race" is what we keep telling ourselves. There is a girl that Engineer R has peripheral and brief association with through school who plays Pokemon, but she more seems like the lone wolf type of player.  Surely her stamina will begin to wane soon..........

In other news, don't sit on wet grass.

It was wet grass. I promise.

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As a number of you are aware, sitting in meetings can be rather boring. I've never really met a meeting I like. Meetings are for people that wear Desert Beige suits from Mr. Mac.

For some reason, people see the need to schedule meetings in the early hours of the day or at 4:30 pm, right when you are trying to go home. And at times, people will schedule meetings that start in the morning and do not adjourn until 4:30 pm. Engineer R sat through such a meeting this week. If meetings bore you, this post may not be the best thing to read right now.

I would tell you that the meeting Engineer R went to was highly enlightening and engaging. But that would be stretching the truth further than a pair of leather pants being stretched between two fruit wains. (I'll bet you never expected us to use both spellings of wain/wane in a single post, did you?).

Nice shiny leather pants.

This meeting Engineer R attended was supposed to teach graduate students how to obtain funding from national agencies. (The NIH, the NSF, the NBA, the NFL, the NRA, the NAACP, etc.). Obtaining external funding is of course a rather worthwhile goal. Maybe at some point Engineer R will desire to devote three straight months of his life to such worthy goals. Although, knowing how slow some of these national agencies move, Donald Trump could be finishing up his second term in the White House by the time Engineer R gets a reply. (It all depends on who shows up more strongly to the polls, the NRA or the NAACP).

The speaker at this meeting was one of those pant-suited ladies with a brushed aluminum coffee thermos permanently affixed to her hand. Most of her jokes either dealt with various methods of imbibement or were rooted in arcane references to 14th century humanist philosophy.  She also liked to throw around big words like "cognitive dissonance," or "post-masticative hypoglycemia," or "Massachusetts." And of course, Engineer R was the hapless sap whom she chose to sit by at lunchtime. Out of 70 tables in the room, she just had to choose the one where Engineer R was merely trying to eat a roast beef sandwich without drawing attention to himself. 

Engineer J continues to do the school thing. The bulk of her week is taken up by listening to people with large vocabularies, but few spoken English skills. We are considering sending an anonymous email to the professor to request that he send a different graduate student to teach the course for him.

This about sums up the post. Tune in next week to possibly hear a story about a job interview with a tractor salesman.