The Comeback Kid

I know this is a common weakness that people have--I hear it all the time...They can't think of a great comeback right when someone pisses them off.

Here's one of my favorite jokes:

A guy from Arkansas goes to Harvard and stops someone to ask them "Excuse me, could you tell me where the library's at?"

The Harvard professor looks over the tops of his glasses and down his nose and informs the man "Here at Harvard, we never end a sentence with a preposition."

So the guy from Arkansas says "Okay, can you tell me where the library's at, asshole?"


The other day I had someone treat me pretty badly while I was out of town. Since I had a car, I had been asked to help shuttle some of the "students" from the class to a picnic we were having--the only problem is that there apparently was no map, no roadsigns, no nothin'.

One of the "brains" of the outfit, who is in fact quite brilliant, was trying to give me directions. Fran and I joke about our trip to England, because there is just a certain way that they give directions that just don't match up with my Krispy Kreme, McDonald's French Fry, and Starbucks-soaked American brain.

Here's an example of an answer to "How do you get to the British Museum from here?"

A: You'll have come out and gone diagonally through the park. The museum is about four blocks down adjacent to next park."

Huh?

The issue is that there are 10 parks in Bloomsbury and all the sidewalks seem to be diagonal. They are technically describing where it is situated but are not giving directions for someone to get there...as helpful as they are trying to be.

So, this guy was trying to tell me how to find this unmarked campsite in Acadia National Park. My idea was to follow him there, but he insisted on me going by myself.

"Turn right here and then go over the bridge on the way out of town. Before you go across the 2nd bridge, it's the unmarked turn-in on your right..."

Wait, wait, wait. Number one, it doesn't matter if I turn right or left here--it's a circle drive..."out of town"? I have no idea which way that is--I came here in the dark, 10 days ago and have worked 100 hours since then! Plus--bridge? What bridge? Which town am I going out of? How can you know before you get to a bridge? Can't these directions possible be drawn out on a map or be given in terms of North, South, East, West, or, at a bare minimum, Left and Right?

Here's what I said: "Wait a moment--turn right when I get out of the circle drive?"

Answer "Drive as though you were leaving the island. There are people already there getting the fires going."

Me: "When I get out of the circle drive, turn right?"

Him, Lord of Bar Harbor Geography: "What, were you helicoptered onto the island? I mean, you did somehow manage to materialize here, right?"

Thinking, where's the library at, ...

Saying "Mnah, muh, ummnh...okay." Yeah, thanks for all the help...

Parting shot "If I get there and you aren't there already, I'm going to really worry about your intellect..."

me: speechless.

Flash forward 12 hours...

I did, in fact find it on the first try and there were, in fact, no people getting the fires going.

I was now on a road trip of my own because I had the day off. Then it hit me, the perfect reponse to this guy (which, I'm sorry, is only funny to about 0.001% of people in the world): "Hey man, week-long timelapse with High NA and short Working Distance!"

If I had said that, the guy would have laughed and thought I was a genius.

A joke that has to be explained, by definition, isn't funny, but I'll enlighten you--The guy was a physicist lecturing on the light-gathering properties of lenses, namely, microscope lenses.

NA is Numerical Aperture--it is a measure of the resolution and light-gathering ability of a lens.

Working Distance is a measure of how far a sample is from the lens, or how much space you have to focus in.

The higher the resolution of a system, the shorter the working distance.

If I had said "High NA, short Working Distance", it would have been answering back in his own, respected, technical terms and would have described my activity over the previous week.

High NA because I was completely focused on the workshop, teaching, and lab work that we were doing all hours of the day and night. We were cooped up in a small 200 square foot lab right by the ocean...which is analagous to "short working distance"

Damn, that would have been perfect!

Or, I could have said "Where's the picnic at, asshole?"