Blessed by the Potato

My hearing, which was never very good to begin with, has really been going downhill lately. My car stereo used to never see the double-digits on the volume (I believe it goes to twenty, but never felt the need to crank it) but now it lives comfortably at 12, going up through 15 for some songs/news reports. Of course, that’s partly because the car is getting louder, too. For the most part, I’m having the most difficultly distinguishing one person talking from another, or a sound from background noise. This leads to much hilarity:

[At a party tonight] “Have you ever seen the A-Team?”

[I misheard] “Eighteen? Is that like 24 but where he gets to take a nap?”

Of course, even more hilarious than my continued slide into senescence is how completely inept scientists can be about certain things. Mailing lists especially. Right now I’ve got four emails that came in today from people sending a message to the whole group asking to be removed after the monthly reminder email came out (this group actually sees more traffic from the montly reminder/unsubscribe message than it does from discussions), plus one email from someone asking to be added to the group! (You can only post if you’re already a member). Another group that sees much more traffic has had nearly half of its traffic lately devoted to morons trying to trade attachments. The mail server strips any non-text attachments, so when the message comes through without an attachment (and with the [attachment removed] notice); they, of course, try again. We’ve tried telling them to put it on a web host and add a link, but if we go more than 3 days without suggesting that, these people can’t seem to figure it out (the same person sometimes!) so then they offer the helpful suggestion that “if anyone wants this just email me and I’ll send you the attachment by private email.” And every time without fail at least 6 people respond to the entire list with their email address and a request for the file.

I won’t even get into engineers putting forks in the microwave because “one’s ok and you need two to close the circuit” because as hilarious as that story is, it’s been told before…