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May 3, 2015 • 7:59 am
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I am in high school, and recently my friend, lets call him M, won a close election in the class SGA. To celebrate we decided to spend an evening about town with a few friends, having dinner at a cheap Italian place and then seeing Chekhov. Afterwards, we went about some more, and we began walking down the main street, all together. Now its around midnight, and my friend who had won the election had been in a production of “Fiddle on the Roof”, so my and my friends (of which only one can sing) begin the seranade M with an awful rendition of the song “To Life” from that musical, with the lyrics changed to say “To M, To M, L’chaim. To M, our treasurer, our friend” etc. We went about this with arms interlocked walking down the main street in our town, and must have seen mad. Anyway, the evening ended with a nice game of D&D, and no one said anything in school the next day.
I was purposefully vague on location and names because I rather not embarrass my friends.
It was 1973. I was a brand new engineer, just out of school, and had just started work in an old-line drafting office.
Back then, smoking at your desk was perfectly normal. I made friends with an old piping designer (he seemed old at the time, anyway – he was probably younger then than I am now) who smoked cigars. As a cub engineer, I got a lot of insight from him as to how the engineering business really worked.
One day, as I was passing through the drafting room, I glanced over and saw that my friend’s trash bin was on fire. He had tossed one of cigar butts into the can and it was merrily blazing away.
Being young and stupid, I pulled the bin away from his table and stuck my foot into it to put out the fire.
Do you remember the old metal trash bins? They were round. Feet are not round. The result was a young man hopping around the drafting room with a flaming metal can stuck to his foot, making inarticulate noises of dismay, while the rest of the room enjoyed the show.
When I finally got my shoe out of the still burning can, another designer calmly picked up a pile of folded prints, displayed them to me, and with a dramatic flourish laid them onto the can, extinguishing the flame. I wasn’t physically hurt, but emotionally…
For weeks, I felt as if everyone in every office I passed was laughing at me behind my back. I seriously considered resigning, but managed instead to arrange a transfer to another office at the same company. I think the HR manager knew about the incident and took pity on me. In any case, it was at least twenty years before I told ANYONE this story. Now, I can tell the story quite easily, and it has on a few occasions actually helped me to assist younger folks in my office when they have managed to embarrass themselves in some way. After hearing my story, the almost universally agree that no matter how embarrassed they might be now, at least they hadn’t been quite as foolish as I was back then.