Physics in the workplace - part 1
enquiring minds (that would be dracoform and feline) are wondering if it is possible to make a lazer out of a room full of programmers.
based on extensive observation at work, all programers have a ground state of "Hungry", and the excited states of "just had a snack" (fed1), "sandwich man has just bin"(fed2) and "the company paid for food, have eaten so much i cannot move"(fed3) all seem to be very fragile.
when the top end state of fed3 has been achieved by the whole room, all that is required to make the programers decay back to Hungry is for someone to produce any one of chocolate, chocolate eclares, or joosers (the subject of an up and coming article).
the other observed method of triggering a decay to "Hungry" is for another programmer to say they are now "Hungry", or for even faster decay, to start eating chips.
now, a laser is basically built out of a large number of identical atoms, which can stimulate the decay of eath other. so you get them all primed in their excited state, and then trigger one of them to decay. the emitted photon stimulates a cascade of decays across (hopefully) all of the atoms. if you can just contain the photons until you have a large number in phase with each other, you have a laser.
so, we have programmers which are easily stilumated by exposure to "hunger photons". now all we need is a way of containing these photons.
since the bin used by the programmers seems to fill with food wrappers at about 50 times the speed of any other bin in the company, it is reasonable to conclude that a programmers room contains the photons quite well.
further observation suggests that this is because programmers dont readily interact with other types of matter. despite appearences programmers do readily interact with each other (as proved by the hunger photon cascade), it is just in a manor that other types of matter dont recognise as valid interaction.
so we can set up a large body of excided programmers, and can contain them in issolation. triggering the emmision cascade is easy, since it only requires a single portion of chips, or other suitable material.
all that remains now is to find out if the emited beam of coherent hunger photons can be made to do useful work.
at work the magic phrase (generated when the room "lases" hunger photons) "i am going to safeway" (the local supermarket, which have removed their specalist donut counter, now only doing 3 types of donut
) can redaly trigger a devastating cascade across the entire building. i have seem it take nearly 2 hours to get the complete list of food to buy put together in preperation for the trip, and it can take 3 programmers 6 journeys to and from the car to get all of the food into the building.
it is worth noting that when this happens aproximately 80 to 90% of all the food is for the programmers (there are 5 of us) while the remaining morcels are for the rest of the company (about another 30 people).
clearly a programmer "hunger photon" lazer is a devistating weapon. your only defence is to make sure that you never let a programmer stray far from food.
the sypmlistic solution of not letting programmers achieve an excited state simply isnt possible. if you have ever tried to keep a hungry programmer and food appart then you would understand why this isnt possible.
so, where's the food???
