Thursday, April 20, 2006

I screw for a living

So the past couple of days have been busy days at work. We're setting up an experiment, which means I've been running up and down ladders carrying equipment that is some combination of heavy, awkward, expensive, so fragile that it can be broken if you breathe on it, laboriously handmade, or irreplaceable. Oh, or radioactive. (It's somewhat less nerve-wracking carrying these things myself than watching other people carry them.) We've had to make a lot of changes to the set-up, which means I've been putting in and taking out the same twenty or thirty screws over and over again. All of a sudden, in the middle of one of these tasks this afternoon, it hit me: I screw for a living.

...although not perhaps in the way my mother feared I would end up doing back when I was eight and showing a marked preference for barbies and dress-up over trucks and lego.

2 comments:

Mike said...

So when they say "Rachel's got a screw loose (again)" that could also be true...

Verif word: eijem. Sounds Dutch (I have a penchant for imagining odd things about those verification words, a bit like cloud shapes only different...)

Leslie Lewis said...

Well I'm rather relieved that it's that sort of screwing you're earning your living at.

Your grandmother embarrassed herself beyond words one day in San Miguel when she asked the gentleman living next door, "How are you at screwing?" She had a screwdriver in her hand at the time, but that didn't make it any better.