I returned to college last month. It’s funny how quickly I forgot how all consuming night school can be. I already have one degree that I earned at night school and now I’m working on my second. Perhaps I should have picked a business degree the first time around and saved myself a little effort.
I supposed it could be worse, I might have actually completed the communications degree I started working towards twenty some years ago, and today I would then be saying….”Would you like fries with that?”
I’m spending much of my time at work surrounded by customers, many of whom have earned their PhD’s. The more I work with my customers the more I find myself confused about the exact placement of the divining line between the mentally retarded and the intellectually gifted.
I made a technical presentation to a group of ten or twelve PhD’s a few weeks back. knew it was going to be a game of my “dancing” to the music they played and trying not to look too stupid and say “I don’t know” more than thirty times in a 60 second period.
I found a few bobbing and weaving tactices that helped me out:
1) Low whistle, “wow, Bob, good question. What do you guys think of Bob’s question? Is it a good question?”
2) I give a light laugh…”I love teaching PhD classes, the questions are just SOOOO good!”
3) “Never heard that one before, why do you ask?”
4) ”I think we’re going to cover that in our next section. If we don’t cover it to your satisfaction in that section, we can come back and discuss it again. “
5) Saying nothing at all for a period of five to ten seconds. Someone else in the room will answer the question for me.
Mind you, I’m not an intellectual lightweight, but I’ve found that I’m doomed in these kinds of presentations. There are always, always, at least two people who don’t get along with each other, or get along with society as a whole, in these presentations. As soon a Dr. A asks any question, Dr. B must ask a question that’s even more difficult than the question Dr. A asked. When I’m able to answer the questions, someone, either Dr. A or Dr. B, will start adding unknown variables.
“So I know that you said that the electrons will do “this and that” when I do” this and that”, but what will the electrons do when I’m drinking a snifter of twenty year old single malt and tap dancing to Bob Dylan’s “the times they are a changing” while I still do “this and that?”
With flop sweat beading on my brow, I say, "When you’re doing “this and that” and the electrons are doing “this and that” and you add in the variables of twenty year aged single malt, Bob Dylan singing “the times they are a changing” and tap dancing you’ll find that the electrons now have pulled out lawn chairs are actively smoking cigars while listening to Bob croon." I’m feeling giddy with the response I was able to pull out, until Dr. B wades into the conversation.
Dr. B will now say, “It’s well documented and very well understood by all classically educated minds that by virtue of Wien’s law of displacement that electrons don’t respond to the single malt whiskey stimulus, they instead respond to a blended whiskey stimuli. Any electron that I’ve observed during my 40 plus years of electron observation experience does not, in fact, like Bob Dylan! My observation is that the Blackbody Radiation effect causes the electrons to appear to respond to Bob Dylan, but the Blackbody Radiation effect shows us that while the electrons may appear to respond to Bob Dylan, they are in fact listening to Tone Loc on little portable MP3 players.”
This is why it’s just easier to say “Good question, I think we’re covering popular music and the Blackbody radiation effect in our next chapter, let’s move on for the moment.”
