Time Out Of Mind

Let me set the scene for this post. I've started a new job, working on various projects until the school year starts and I can start my new graduate assistantship and work on my Ph.D. The lab I'm working for, like all great labs, gets a significant amount of funding from the U.S. military. Joy of joys, I get to work for the military yet again. And this time for three straight years instead of one summer.

Quick note: for those who are unaware, I spent a summer in Albuquerque, New Mexico - a.k.a. I'd-rather-watch-instructional-videos-on-puppy-torture-than-live-here, USA - for the Air Force Research Lab. The job was fun, but there was far too much procedural bullshit associated with the government/military.

Last week, there were a series of information sessions on how to start filling out your time sheet electronically. Basically, you log in, you find the projects you're working on, you enter them into the sheet along with how many hours you spent on each. There. I just explained to you in thirty seconds what it took them an hour to explain. And if that wasn't bizarre enough, there was - get this - a question and answer session.

And boy, did people take full advantage of the question and answer session. In the beginning, the questions were kind of valid. Questions such as, "what do I do if I'm going to be on travel for two weeks?" These are non-asinine questions. Then it got to the point where there were questions such as, "what if I try to put down more hours than are in the work week?" To paraphrase, what if I try to put down 25 hours a day? I wanted to take my sweet new RFID badge and jam it up their ass. Or maybe I wasn't that outwardly hostile - maybe my own ass. Point is, I wanted that question to be some sort of Queen-of-diamonds trigger to a violent episode of inanimate anal entry.

What really annoyed me were the lines that were good enough to get laughs. Stupid answers like, "Well, [if you put down too many hours] I guess I'll have to report you to human resources!" Then everyone chuckles? That is not funny. That's nowhere close to funny. I may not have the best sense of humor in the world, but at least I don't suffer from - as Hornby put it - premature laugh-ejaculation. My response would have been something to the effect of, "If you put down too many hours, then I'm going to force you to put a Hannah Montana poster up in your office/cubicle. That way, everyone will regard you as either a pedophile or someone with horrible taste." And that's just off the cuff. Imagine if I had time to think about it.

In short, No other hour of my life has so single-handedly cast a shadow of doubt upon if not my choice of career, then at least the nature of it. How can something truly exciting as living on the very cusp of scientific discovery attract the most boring people on the planet? If there are any social theorists out there, I'd like to know the answer. You work on that while I return this puppy-torture video to Blockbuster.