Opus

Project work these days is getting a lot frustrating. It is long since I realised that I am in a Catch-22. There are times when things are working fine, but that is when I know that I am but swimming in waters of mediocrity. But when things aren't (like right now) it gets extremely frustrating to wake up every morning and remember that what I seek is to be able to swim in waters of mediocrity.

To rub salt on the irritation, there are people who come and ask me about my project work. Not that they mean any malintent but the prospect of being answerable to every inquisitive bugger is hardly a very pleasant prospect. However, being an amiable and reasonable man, I cannot therefore be predisposed to shrug every poor bugger off, one who unwittingly asks me about my project. Therefore the best I can do is to humour him/her by putting myself up for public ridicule as follows:

Bugger: So what is it that you're working on these days? How's it going?

Me: I'm concerned with the application of Penetration theory. These days are real bad for I'm experiencing Stiffness problems. Too stiff.

Poor Bugger: What the fuck?

Me: He he (007 smirk)...too bad your major wasn't chemical engineering.

Note: For the innocent, 'Penetration theory' is a theory of solute diffusion in a solvent. It was proposed by Higbie, a man who was ostensibly good at certain things and liked to carry over his panache to work too. Now when this theory (of diffusion) is applied to the system that I am working on (oxidation of cyclohexane), it results in a system of five coupled differential equations in the concentration variables that need to be solved together. Because of bad scaling and non-linearity (if you are really 'innocent' then don't bother reading further), the concentration variables vary in different orders of magnitude. This makes the equations 'stiff' and difficult to solve.