Yesterday the culture shock of not being at MIT finally hit me. I was wearing my “and G-d said…and there was light” shirt at a small get-together with fellow coworkers. (Okay, so I don’t purposefully wear that shirt around–it was an undershirt, but my dress shirt+tie wasn’t appropriate for the atmosphere either). Anyway, someone asks me about my shirt and I realize that no one in the room knows what it means. For seven years I’ve been used to the people I hang out with knowing what it meant and half the people being able to explain it.
The fact that no one knew Maxwell’s equations was fine, but then a coworker said he “finally learned what log was after being mystified on high school math tests for three years.” Oy. I almost went into shock. Although, I should have been clued in to this situation when one of the first staffers I met changed majors when the economics department reqiured that he use excel. I still make fun of “Excel Man” for that.