Of Mice and Endless Degrees

If you've ever read my blog before you know I'm a graduate student. This is my fourth year working on a MS/PhD in engineering and I'm hoping to finish everything by the summer of 2008. My time here is beginning to feel endless, even though I have a theoretical goal date to complete my degree. Occasionally, my husband and I start to dream of life on the outside where people with so-called "jobs" make alleged "salaries" for doing supposed "work" after which they have fun with their theoretical "social lives". Then we laugh and say, "Ha! We're going to be in school forever. Life out there can't be all that great anyway, right?"

I realized just how long I've been in school when the mouse on my computer started making funny noises. I started hearing a dry, scraping noise when I move the mouse. In an effort to diagnose the problem, I checked out my mousie undercarriage. I've got an optical mouse, so the only thing visible on the bottom of the creature is a bright red laser spot and three raised pads that let the mouse slide around smoothly. I scraped away the grime that had collected around the pads, but that didn't help the scratching noise, so I took another look.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that each sliding pad fits into a little molded ring on the base of the mouse. I assume the molded ring is there to help the monkeys in the mouse factory stick the pads in the right places. Anyway, as I looked at my mouse sliders, I realized that the pads have been worn down to the level of the molded rings. WhenI slide my mouse on my desk, the rings scrape on the laminate surface and make that dry, scratchy noise.

Then I looked at my desk. The whole mouse region is worn and rubbed so the color is a little lighter than the rest of the surface. In retrospect, I suppose using a mouse pad could have prevented all of these problems, but the point of this story isn't to educate you on the merits of a mouse pad.

The point of this story is that I have now realized that I've spent way too much time sitting at this desk, rubbing a mouse back and forth on a table. So much time, in fact, that I wore away the sliding pads on the bottom of my mouse and scratched the surface of my desk.

My only consolation is that when I finish (maybe, someday, possibly, potentially, eventually, perhaps) people will have to call me "Doctor". Too bad I won't be able to do much of anything useful, like saving people or delivering babies. That's the problem with getting a PhD. You toil, you suffer, you sacrifice your 20s for the good of "science" or "art" or "society" or whatever, and in the end, you're still a pretend doctor with no actual skills.

You know what? I'm okay with that, I think. Just don't ask me how much longer I'm going to be in school...