Exciting times in the life of an entomologist
November 06, 2011
This is a story Mattgreen told me a couple of weeks ago when he got home from work, and it was so funny I decided to save it.
Mattgreen, as you probably know, works with insects. Sometimes people from other institutions or other parts of the company come to visit and tour the lab. On this particular day, Mattgreen had a visit from the bubbly, enthusiastic social media girls from the Marketing Department. They were looking for ideas on how to raise the company's profile via social media - apps, Twitter, blogging etc.
As he showed them round, one of them was making notes in her pad. She said, "I've just got so many ideas, my head's fizzing with ideas!"
Girl: Could we do this?
Mattgreen: We could... that'd be nice, but unfortunately that'd be illegal.
Girl: Could we do that?
Mattgreen: Yeeeeah, hmm, maybe not. That's illegal too.
Girl: What about ....
Mattgreen: We could blog about that, and it would be very good ... if it was in fact true.
Girl: I've got another idea, wouldn't it be amazing if we could track ....
Mattgreen: It would certainly be amazing to track that sort of stuff but it's sadly beyond the laws of physics.
Girl: How about ...
Mattgreen: That one's feasible, that could actually work. It'd cost about a million pounds. Given infinite resources, we could DEFINITELY do that.
(pause)
Mattgreen: What does that leave you with? Tracking caterpillars as an app? Excellent, yeah... go with that then.
