The state of my office
12th January 2007
Perhaps, instead of all this fuss about trying to convince the general public that scientists are perfectly normal, non-geeky people, I should rebel. I should tell them what my office is like and convince them that we are all two cabbages short of an allotment, or should that perhaps be two photons short of a light bulb. The Microsoft Office cat has just purred at me and waggled its ears. It seems to know that it's a few quanta short of being a real living friend.
Tea is the fuel for all real thinking, as we all know. Coffee is just for those who think that work is just human pinball and the more times you bounce off the walls, the more effective you are, with a bonus every time you knock something over in excitement. Anyway, I've just moved the six empty tea mugs to my officemate's desk from my own so that I am not accused of having a cluttered desk. Mind you, as has been pointed out before, if a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what is the message sent by an empty desk? I'll clear up the scattered chocolate wrappers later, if my mind ever feels up to the associated zen challenge.
Above my desk, a bright green frog is glaring at me from behind a leaf. Safely below the danger path of the glare are a pot of lithium chloride (it turns flames pink), a sachet of raspberry tea, a lovingly-chosen selection of useless stationary and a thing that makes cuckoo noises. A collection of about 150 scientific papers shares a shelf with a pepsi can brought alive by a rubber glove hat, a pair of sunglasses and a moustache. It looks very friendly, that can, but I suspect that hidden away inside, bacteria are teeming and indeed teaming up to evolve into more intelligent beings that will regard all the accumulated scientific wisdom behind them as little more than reports that pets have written about their toys. (I wonder how the Microsoft cat is doing with its study into the usefulness of chasing its tail.)
My laptop sits on top of a chunky book from a conference called "Diamond Films 1995", just next to the book on metals, the chess set and a marker pen which I have owned for a year but which has only just revealed to me the fact that both ends of it write. Post-it notes randomly adhere to any free surfaces, liberally distributed like health warnings on food packets. There is a wooden duck on wheels sitting just behind the computer screen.
The floor is a giant shelf for storing packets of balloons, a pot of talcum powder, a spinning top, a pile of textbooks, and a box for the kettle. It also shelters my final year undergraduate project on gunpowder and anything else that feels the need to check no-one has mucked around with the direction of gravity recently. And I suppose that technically, I am stored on this shelf-that-is-the-floor as well, perched atop my rotating chair as a living demonstration of the conservation of angular momentum.
What kind of job makes all of this normal, necessary and frequently useful? I think that the answer might be "Any job that I do", thereby logically vanquishing the appeals by my parents when I was younger to tidy my bedroom. Living in that bedroom was the best possible preparation for working life. Now, where did I put my bubble solution?
