There is a lady where I work, who would be in her - I'm guessing here - sixties. It's difficult to tell. She's tall and lean, and a likeable sort; lively and cheeky. I find her dress sense rather endearing: fashion-wise, she walks a fine line between "hip" and "hip replacement". Dyes her straight, shoulder-length hair jet black and parts it straight down the middle. But tucks it behind her ears. Wears some chunky necklaces - but also dangles a pair of glasses round her neck from a cord. Wears funky, bold patterned shirts - with boldly mismatching skirts. Has some nice opened-toed shoes, which she often chooses to wear with thick tan stockings. She's the company's Executive Assistant. I think she's a "career secretary", and I find that kind of cool, like it's something from a bygone era. I imagine her at sixteen, sitting there in Secretary School with her girlfriends, back straight, typing up dictation. Giggling between every line. She has a stenographer's typewriter in her office. Today at the environmental meeting she pulled out a fountain pen, and after taking a quick look at the wide, flat nib I automatically assumed that she would start taking notes in shorthand. I was right.

Shorthand! Does anyone still learn this? I know of a few people my mother's age who can use shorthand - or used to be able to - but it's pretty rare.

In her role, she is in the unique position of working so closely with the managing director that they have become almost like family, which is why she was able to get tipsy at our national sales conference a few months back and start her speech with: "Well, 2007 was another CRAP year working at Books O'Reilly."

I'm not going anywhere with this. I just thought she was such an interesting character study that she ought to be recorded somewhere.

The new design manager at work sits one cubicle wall away from me. This has meant that we now throw things over the partition at one another. At first it was a crumpled piece of paper. Then a small paper aeroplane nosedived onto my keyboard. I unfolded it to find the words, "YOU SMELL". I amended this slightly, so that by the time it had sailed back to her desk it read, "YEAH WELL YOU SMELL WORSE". I do like my job.

I read a great news article today. That link will probably go dead in a few hours but just in case anyone actually reads this in the next day or so, I'm posting it anyway. The gist of it is that scientists have designed a network "capable of downloading data at 10,000 times the speed of a typical broadband connection". This in itself is impressive, as it had never occurred to me that there could be an alternative to the Internet Almighty. It almost feels blasphemous. However, it's when they start describing why this network was designed that the story becomes fascinating. Apparently they've built an enormous particle accelerator to try to work out how the Universe began. Naturally they're expecting the information payload to be quite massive, hence the high-speed data transfer network. Fair enough.

It's just that I just love the part where they add that said particle accelerator is at the centre of a lawsuit that claims it could create a black hole that will destroy the Earth.

Awesome!

So I probed this subject gently on Wikipedia, taking care not to take things too fast, and here's a bit more on the subject:

Concerns have been raised that performing [particle] collisions at previously unexplored energies might unleash new and disastrous phenomena. These include the production of micro black holes, and strangelets. ... however, after detailed studies, scientists reached such conclusions as "beyond reasonable doubt, heavy-ion experiments at RHIC will not endanger our planet" ...

Most businesses make their staff conduct "market research" and "feasibility studies", and work out "projected profits". Not these guys. They had to go away and write a report on Why Our Project Will Not Destroy The Planet.

Based on what I have read, I calculate that every man-hour spent doing these guys' jobs produces three and a half megafonzes (mF) of cool.