Exhaustion

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 areas¹ 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 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.