THE HOLY GRAIL

Back in the nineteen-eighties I was working on a project with a tight deadline, along with about a hundred and fifty other people. Most of them engineers.
The deadline was the end of October, only seven weeks away. So almost all of us were working twelve hour days, six or seven days a week. Some even more.

September and October of that year had some of the hottest weather San Francisco ever experienced. Nothing but ninety-plus degrees. Which would have been lovely, except that we were at the top of a building, that, like many tall buildings erected before the war, had not been designed with effective ventilation and air-conditioning in mind. The top two floors had not been modernized..... and had NO AIR-CONDITIONING.

What it did have was one hundred and fifty people (most of them engineers) with no time for laundry. In sauna-like conditions.


I am sure you can imagine the problem.


See, if you do not have time for laundry, you do not have time to relax either. No time to vent, to relieve your stress, to scream and shout. No time for your mind to engage in the deconstruction process so necessary for mental equilibrium. No time to decompose.
Whiskey only goes so far to rectify that problem.
[Most real engineers drink whiskey, I do not know why. Software engineers are not real engineers and many of them do not drink whiskey. They drink foofy drinks or flavoured vodka instead. Which just goes to show that they aren't real engineers.]


By the third week, some of the conversations were not entirely reality-based.
I get along fine with people who are not grounded in reality. Like cats and dogs and disturbed infants, they like me - or at least come over to have their furry little ego stroked. This is unnerving and problematic when strangers do it on the street, but when it happens sixteen floors up, with sweaty engineers, it is healthy.

Someone, I do not remember his name, speculated about the possibility that there were people out there whose organs of reproduction were at a ninety degree angle from the norm. I do not know how or why that subject came up. I doubt that it had anything to do with the unprintable joke (from Penthouse magazine) I may have told about the Martian woman who had a button at both ends of her unmentionable, and no, I certainly do not remember the joke, so please do not ask. But it was very funny, and well worth telling.

Anyhow, I denied the likelihood of such an occurrence. It is completely out of the question, and if you remember your high-school biology classes (development of the young from egg to eruption), you will understand why it is well-nigh impossible.

Before I knew it, I had made a bet - "find me a medically documented case of a woman whose dotdotdot is horizontally aligned (button, vestigial or otherwise, at BOTH ends, please), and I will pay you one hundred dollars. This bet is open to everyone, all you have to do to is put in ten dollars to compete".


News of this wager got around, and I had to explain it regularly to people who had just heard about it for the next week. I was not kind, and did not easily tolerate their naiveté. And my know-it-all arrogance just begged to be taken down a notch. I sneered at their lack of knowledge, their innocent gullibility, their vain assertion that surely all things were possible. Fools! Did they not know about cell-division?


For the next several weeks, one hundred and fifty people (most of them engineers), spent all of their spare time reading about groin. They even pulled friends and neighbors into the pursuit.


There's probably a name for people who obsessively read about genitalia.

And I can well imagine the effect of that hobby on their families.


We got the project done by the deadline. When it was all over, most of the one hundred and fifty probably STILL had thoughts only for.... you know, that thing. Fevered imaginations pondering the mechanics of a ninety degree rotation of......... that thing. Minds filled with...... that thing. Fragile little engineering brainy-wainies, all a-fever with a certain image...... Fantasies of.....
Wrong way, too.

One hundred and fifty people (most of them engineers) single-mindedly thinking about dotdotdot is probably the closest I have ever come to group-sex.
It was good for me, though. I know I enjoyed it.