Lunch room

The lunch room on our floor at work is a place of refuge. Many times, I have walked in there in the darkest of moods - after a failed experiment, a break-up with a boyfriend, a horribly busy and long day - to find peace and laughter. Even on the most beautiful of spring days, I will chose to bring my lunch/snack/coffee into the lunch room so I can share that break with whoever happens to be in there with me during that time. We also come up with some pretty brilliant ideas sitting around our lunch table.

Most of those ideas are concerned with how to a) make money, b) find alternative careers or c) how to avenge whatever our boss had done/said that week. Some ideas from this week:

Madonna was filming a movie (her being the director, yes, weird!) on our block at Sotheby's - big auction house - so we thought we could kidnap her and ask for ransom. Problem is, she might not have anyone who would pay ransom. Alternative: kidnap her daughter - plays in movie - and have Madonna pay ransom. Much better.

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Train some of our mice to find and steal diamonds from Sotheby's. That is, eat them, and then we can find said diamonds later in the cages. Alternatively, we can use the rats the neighboring lab uses just in case the diamonds prove to be too large for the mice.

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Start selling lab equipment to poorer nations who might not be able to afford a fancy real-time PCR machine, like Hungary. But we would only accept cash; that might be a problem. Alternative: we could start a business in genotyping people instead of mice - that is, if you wanna know if you're gonna have Alzheimer's, we might be able to tell you that you have a 4% chance instead of the 3% that is the general population - I just made the numbers up, but no joke, that is what some companies do for thousands of dollars. Other alternative: sell the blood we isolate human cells from. Believe it or not, this might be in demand: http://everything2.com/title/blood+drinking.

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Next time I have to give lab meeting, I would come in full fencing outfit and use my foil as pointer instead of the laser pointer. And then Lionel wanted to say something, he would have to raise his hand and I would have to point at him before he could speak and if he ever interrupted me, I could just do a "Zorro" on him. Need to work on writing a "J" with my foil on someone's skin. Alternative: instead of the full outfit, I would just bring the biggest sword I have and strategically place it between the two of us so he could see it very well. I could slice his bagel with it if he wanted one.

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We could sell his hair - he has famously big and frizzy hair and for all the money he makes, he gets his horrible haircuts at Supercuts down the street, witnessed by multiple people from the lab - to make wigs out of for cancer patients. Alternatively, we could feed him to alligators. I am not sure how we arrived at this latest idea, but no joke, this came up too, we even decided that the Everglades would be a good place for this to be done.