Gophers and Disciplinary Action

Gopher
Not gopher

I mentioned to Dirk this afternoon—while he was gamely trying to get software working that we both know can never be fixed—that due to my poor management the members of the Being & Nothingness Cam Team don’t think I’ll do anything about their failure to submit their biographies (now 2-3 weeks overdue). I could say this to Dirk because he already knows that I’m not managing things well.

He told me that people will think that you’re as smart as a bag of gophers unless you prove them wrong. I don’t think that people assume others' are stupid, but I loved his turn of a phrase. I asked him if he thought that a bag of gophers shouldn’t be smarter than a single gopher, and he said, If a single gopher is stupid then more gophers aren’t going to be smarter. It’s like zero times twenty.

This gave me a good excuse to look for a photo of a gopher and to my delight both of the above photos came up to my gopher search request. The first is a pocket gopher. The second is not.

With Dirk’s philosophy in mind I have determined that I must not, however unlikely, be thought of by the Team members as a sack of gophers. I’ve decided that now I will use as punishment something I was going to do as a joke.