goer.org

« Can Has Niece Plz? | Main | Fool Me Once, Can't Get Fooled Again »

Back Off Man, I'm a Scientist

Forget driving. Forget voting. Forget your first real job. Forget moving into your first apartment. Forget true love and true heartbreak. In this country, you know you've finally become a real grown-up when your parents finally force you to take away all your boxes of crap.

Oh, I managed to hold them off for a decade, but finally my folks decided that they were redecorating. Which in 20- and 30-something circles is known as "playing the nuclear option." Fortunately, their timing was pretty good, since I was already on a quest to find my long-lost college diploma. See, my insurance agent told me that he could get me a "Scientist" discount on my car insurance, as long as I could provide proof that I had a Bachelor of Science degree.

Don't get me wrong -- I protested that I wasn't a working scientist, far from it. I told him that these days I couldn't do a path integral to save my life. I told him about the thermometers I dropped in undergrad lab, about the spontaneous magnet quench back in grad school -- the head grad student gave me the evil eye for that, but that totally wasn't my fault! I told my agent that I had decided for the good of humanity to stay as far away from the lab as possible. "I do English...y stuff right now," I told him. "One of the proudest moments in my career was when a software engineer chastised me, saying, 'I don't know what your degree is in, English or whatever, but I have a degree in Mathematics.'" (That's when you know you've really made it as a tech writer.)

But my agent said all that didn't matter, just send him a Xerox of the degree and voila. So thanks to my folks, and the estimated 65 grams of fine particulate dust I inhaled during the arduous search process, I am now saving some serious $$ on my car insurance! Who needs that silly lizard anyway? Does he have a Bachelor's degree... in SCIENCE?

Anyway, I'm glad to see the ol' diploma doing some good again. People say college is overrated, and that's probably true -- unless you're a Scientist like me. After all, another 1,350 years of driving, and this baby just about oughtta pay for itself.

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 27, 2008 at 8:01 PM | Comments (2)

Post a comment

Name

Email Address

URL (Optional, but hides your email address)

Are you a spammer? Yes No (REQUIRED — you must select "No" to post.)

Remember personal info?

NOTE: For mysterious reasons, comment posting is extremely slow right now. It can take from 30-60 seconds after you hit "Submit" for your comment to post. However, your comment will go through; you shouldn't need to click the button again.

Comment Syntax

The basics:

• For a new paragraph, enter two carriage returns.
• Plain URLs such as http://www.yahoo.com automatically become links.
• The system encodes all angle brackets and ampersands. For example, if you try to enter a HTML paragraph, the system displays the open tag literally as "<p>".

Show advanced syntax