Unfair Advantage

My weekdays are spent working in a place that has an overabundance of PhD’s. From my perspective most are mired in an excessive amount of arrogance, although I’m often told that they are brilliant, which I guess is supposed to make up for their lack of social skills. So I thought “brilliant?” “really?” Hmmm, I reached for the dictionary where the first definition of brilliant states that it is an adjective meaning; Full of light; shining. To be fair they are brilliant intellectually, which is the last definition of the word by the way, but as it relates to their personalities unfortunately they’re not the brightest crayons in the box.

In any event, last week was “Engineer’s Week” and one of the things they tried this year was to delve into people’s personal lives to see what makes them tick. So they opened it up to include everyone and asked for submissions in the form of a slide show presentation containing 50 photos or thereabouts of what you love to do in your spare time. I thought well, I’m not an engineer, but I have a life, I’ll send in some of my colorful garden photos, brilliant! And of course I raised my hand and committed to participate.

Then a few days before the deadline I started to pull everything together, plenty of time I told myself, but this became a real pain in the neck, because for the past year my computer has had this problem and I’ve been too preoccupied with life to take the time to buy a new one, I haven’t been able to download or upload photos, instead I’ve been buying new flash cards for the camera, they’re so cheap. Well of course I forgot about this little problem until I attempted to burn a CD (not so brilliant). I tried to outwit the thing, I put a blank CD in the drive and then dragged and dropped the files from the folders on my hard drive onto the CD. It was hit or miss, out of four attempts only one CD actually burned photos. Talk about heightened frustration, I wanted to throw it out the window!! Ultimately I scraped 50 photos together of flowers from last season, put them in the required file format and sent them in.



The response from the employees was very robust. Then unbeknownst to me and the other participants the organizers decided to make it a contest, with prizes no less, so of course more entries poured in. In the end we all sat through two lunch hours worth of photos projected on a huge screen. It was a lot of fun actually, most of the folks had traveled and presented their trips from all over the world, some boring, some breathtaking. Then came mine, and they were more beautiful when they were enlarged to that size if I say so myself. When the following photo of a bee on a phlox bloom flashed up on the vast screen everyone said in unison, “Oooh!” as if it was scripted. Very funny.



Then once it was all over, we were asked to write our choice on a ballot and pop it into a box. Of course I voted for myself! The next day the votes were counted, the winners announced, and there it was, I won first prize. I found that I liked winning, especially given the IQ of the competition. But it really wasn’t fair, being that I'm an artist my photos stood out from the rest. But as a result of the photo essays many of the self-centered brainiacs now speak to me, so I guess they aren’t all socially inept after all, I think they are just shy. Go figure.

CD