mindsquirt

I was admiring my friend mike’s bottle opener last night.

It is elegant in it’s simplicity. It has many features: keychain hole, beer tab opener, magnet for the fridge, and j-shaped thing for opening bottles. All of this fits unto something 3” long and is a single piece of extruded aluminum, except for the magnet. It probably is made of about 12 cans worth of aluminum. No space is wasted. There is no flashy decoration or gimmicky ergonomic handle. It is all there.

I covet it.

I am serious, I really admire it’s simplicity and functionality. I know a lot of other engineers / tech geeks read this blog. You guys may feel me. Any comments from you dorks?

There is a person in this very room who continuously choughs. It is next to impossible to concentrate when I hear her coughing every 20 seconds. I am about to lose my mind on her. Before lunch I was trying to read a very complicated paper on image reconstruction and it sounds like I am in a TB ward. I have tried passively-aggressively retaliating with counter-choughs and slamming my drawers loudly right after she coughs, but she isn’t catching on. I don’t see myself speaking to her, so I guess this will go on until I quit. She isn’t sick because she has done this for the 2 months I have been at my new desk. Maybe they are sympathy choughs and she wants someone to ask her if she is okay.

BTW, this is the same person who puked in the hall way, who I abandoned without pause. You can read about that in this blog.

When I was in another part of the building about a year ago I was trying to finish up my master’s thesis and I was writing my manuscript and finishing up a model or two. It was all somewhat new to me and difficult. There was a guy up there who also coughed about 2 times a minute. His choughs were about 100 times worse than this girls because it sounded like he was choking when he coughed. There were wet and gagging. You know, like when a small bit of food is resting in your throat and you have to hack it back into your mouth for more mastication? He did that 2-3 times a minute nonstop from morning until 5, when he left. After about 2 months of this I was convinced it was a nervous tick and not a pathological problem with his esophagus. He eventually went back to China, so I didn’t have to assault him after all. He also had his fingers in his nose quite a bit. He went way beyond normal booger extraction and would just kind of dig around in there for minutes at a time. I think he did it when he was deep in thought. I wish I were making that part up. He was a real piece of work.

In that area of the office, the desks were arranged without partition walls. I eventually got so sick of his hacking and fingering of his nose, that I started stacking stuff in between our desks in an attempt to block him from my view and muffle the hacking noise. I used file cabinets, bookshelves, and I even stood some ceiling tiles on end like a shield between us because I thought it would absorb some of the hacking sounds. It extremely obvious what I was doing, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Other people asked why I was doing that and I openly admitted I thought the coughing guy was a sociopath. Sometimes I did it within ear-shot of the guy, but I STILL don’t think he caught on.

That is all I got for now. Please check back later for a story about how annoyed I get when my pens fall out of my pen holder.