{"id":373,"date":"2008-03-27T20:01:32","date_gmt":"2008-03-28T00:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/back_off_man_im_a_scientist"},"modified":"2013-11-17T23:39:01","modified_gmt":"2013-11-17T23:39:01","slug":"back_off_man_im_a_scientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2008\/03\/back_off_man_im_a_scientist.html","title":{"rendered":"Back Off Man, I’m a Scientist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forget driving. Forget voting. Forget your first real job. Forget moving into your first apartment. Forget true love and true heartbreak. In this<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/em> degree is in, English or whatever, but I<\/em> have a degree in Mathematics<\/em>.'” (That’s when you know you’ve really made it as a tech writer.)<\/p>\n

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<\/a> anyway? Does he have a Bachelor’s degree… in SCIENCE?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":805,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions\/805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}