Lunch Drama

Friday lunches are festive. The hours leading up to the lunches, even more so. To illustrate:

a. My department goes to lunch every Friday to a G's. And we've been doing so since the beginning of time, so we just fax in our orders at 11.45 and our lunch is at our table the minute we walk into the restaurant. The fax part of it is usually a task assigned to the co-op/intern bakras. Rumor has it that at one point of time, since we did not have a co-op around, Rb picked up the job. Now that he isn't around anymore, the boss runs around for the same chore. Hence, at this morning's all important scrap meeting, we finish up with a solution. The Excel fax file is now on the company's shared R: drive, thereby enabling all the folks from different departments that join us to access it. They will get an Outlook reminder at a specified time in the morning that will in fact remind them to go to that file and add their order to it! Bingo, no one needs to run around asking people for their orders anymore. Aah, the marvels of modern technology.

b. One upping the whole arrangement above, is my little coterie of friends that does lunch so many times together that we do not go to the same place every week. We'd be brain dead by now if we did! So, our debates are usually about where to go. Case in point - today. Everyone is OK for everything. Our choices: Panini Panini, Ras Dashen, Indian. So, after a thread of about 10 emails, we decide to leave the decision to the point once we all get into the car. But, here comes the magic e-mail from JohnH. Read on:

Okay, we’re all engineers, and we’re all smart people. What we need is a quick, easy, and uncomplicated solution that is guaranteed to produce a fair outcome for all those involved. What I’m proposing is that I’ll write up a little FORTRAN code in my Argonne Mesa phase II PSCAD case study to simulate high frequency noise on a DC voltage line. Each of you will then pick a number between 0 and 1 and a multiple of .003 (the solution time step) and then I will randomly sample the AC component of the bus at that time to determine the AC voltage. I’ll average each of your respective voltages and if the final summation is positive, we’ll go to Panini-Panini, if it’s negative we’ll get Ethiopian. Clearly this is the best, easiest solution, and I should have something compiled and working for us to use by Monday afternoon. See you all at noon :-D

Blink, blink. And JohnG starts the number thread, and we all follow. We add two numbers each.. one between 0 and 1, and one that is a multiple of .003! Sabina sent a single number - Pi, as best as she could remember it. BUT, we were all wrong, WHY? JohnH wanted ONE number that satisfied both criteria!!! Oh well, another spate of emails unleashed..

And you say engineers are boring people? Not as exciting as investment bankers, lawyers and doctors?

Pooh-pah!