Bizarro Universe

I have been offered a position as a technical advisor to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. I can't take it because it would require a move, but it's tempting.

I was offered the position based on some recent work I have done which was well receieved. I can't go into details, but I examined the potential for using hurricanes as a biological weapon delivery system. You'll be pleased to hear it's not practical.

This is actually similar to a position that was offered to me a while back, at which time I also declined, even though the offer was to provide expertise to the office of Tom Ridge.

Everything above is completely true.

The Not-So-Secret Adventures of Andy's Flunky

I have a flunky named Claudia. She's awesome, and I'm glad we hired her.

Claudia is a PE and a mechanical engineer. She doesn't have a huge amount of experience doing what we do, but she's got a lot of associated engineering background. She doesn't know enough to run projects by herself, so her current assignment (if you can call it that) is to run around with me and take on the daily chores of a variety of my jobs. This frees me up to do things like marketing, and management, and posting to my Livejournal. Oops.

Claudia is a wee little woman. She's probably 100 pounds soaking wet. This is useful because she can get back into crawl spaces and tunnels that I don't fit into. I'm 250 pounds bone dry, and my steam tunneling days are long gone. (I can still get into the Rice tunnels with nothing more than a kitchen knife, though. I tried.) Claudia is the daughter of a plumber, and she has no reservations about getting dirty in pursuit of something important. That's a great trait for an engineer to have.

Claudia is also very cute, and has the magical ability to talk to anybody about everything. This, too, is very useful. Claudia comes with me to many of my meetings, and sometimes these meetings turn ugly. When this happens, Claudia starts talking on behalf of the firm, and her eyes get REAL BIG, and suddenly shouty people find they have a hard time maintaining their shoutiness. Claudia is actually my second cute flunky; my first cute flunky performed a similar role admirably before she moved back to California. Nobody else in this office would work with either woman, probably because they are sexists -- but me, I recognize the value of a good, cute flunky.

Lately Claudia has been adventuring in the bowels of Baker College, my old stomping ground at Rice. The older parts of this college are almost 100 years old, and the basement looks like Jame Gumb's secret lair in _Silence_of_the_Lambs_, complete with old bricked-off sections full of abandoned crap. It's a deeply creepy and spider-infested place.

Recently Claudia and I crawled into a low section of the basement chasing down some chilled water and steam lines. We're working on a project to upgrade some of that building's systems, so it's our job to roam the basement looking for things that have gone badly wrong. One of the things I spotted was a nasty puddle of water in the crawspace right below a plumbing line.

Claudia duck-walked over to the line and shone her light up at it. "What kind of line is this?" she asked.

"I dunno yet; don't stand right under it," I warned her.

"I can't really see what's going on, but...." There was a flushing noise, and then a gout of water came down off the pipe and hit Claudia in the face.

"Oh God!" she said.

"Claudia," I said seriously, "that's a plumbing waste line."

"Thanks Andy!"

She did get a certain amount of liquid in her mouth and eyes. We got her rinsed out right away, and I don't believe she's any worse for the wear. But, eyuw. Claudia shows no immediate signs of quitting, thank goodness. A good cute flunky is hard to find.