34. He Doesn’t Need to Google “Embarrassing”
“Astronomer here! So if we were to just meet on the street, you probably wouldn’t guess I was a scientist (I am a woman who enjoys dresses when the weather is nice) and this was doubly true when I was a few years younger in my 20s and single. Especially at bars.
So at the end of college, I was doing a summer internship in Mountain View, California where if you went out there’d be a lot of Google boys who would literally sometimes wear ‘Google’ shirts so you’d know they’re extra obnoxious.
I remember getting stuck chatting with one, and when he asked my major he sneered with the ‘Do you really know the subject?’ attitude. He even asked me if I knew what the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was. And when I explained his 20 questions, he said ‘It’s probably not so hard because they go easy on women because they don’t want to scare them off.’
Then he proceeded to tell me about a lecture he attended in Mountain View that he’d been lucky enough to visit, as a Google employee, by Jill Tarter who runs the SETI Institute. He proceeded to tell me about the Allen Telescope Array they were building in northern California because I ‘might not know about it.’
I gave him a minute for his spiel but then said I actually was working for Jill that summer at the SETI Institute, on interference mitigation for the Allen Telescope Array. And did he want to hear what she was really like, or see some pictures from the ATA site? I’d also just met Frank Drake, and he was really nice!
Oh man, was that guy not happy! But hey at least he stopped talking to me like right after.”
