A few weeks ago, I was off on a business trip. It’s hard to summarize what
all needed doing, but suffice it to say there was plenty. Much of it was
stuff that worked in our lab but not on site. We knew there would be some of
that sort of breakage, so our crew included quite an assortment of skills.
I mostly provided my own skills at the beginning of the week, and moved onto
questionable areas[^q] for the rest of the week.
So, on Wednesday or Thursday morning — who can remember which — we were on
the way to a nearby [Radio Shack][radiosnack] for some parts. We were seeing
a strange DC bias on one of the lines coming from a component we couldn’t
really do much about, so we went looking for some resistors. But that’s
beside the point.
On the way there, I shared this with everyone:
> I can’t stop thinking that there’s some number _n_, where if we can sneak
that number of goats into the building without anyone figuring out that
it’s our fault, all our problems go away.
The first response was something along the lines of “you really need some
sleep.” I did not dispute that assertion. The second was “is that African
or European goats?” Naturally, if makes a difference what sort of goats you
use, you don’t have enough of them. Duh.
The guy at Radio Shack didn’t seem surprised that the first item on our
shopping list was “2 goats.” They must get a lot of sleep-deprived customers
right when they open.
[^q]: Questionable in that I wasn’t really an expert at solving those
problems, just familiar with them. Hey, there was a lot of work
to do.
[radiosnack]: http://www.radioshack.com