Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I usually answer that I’m a professional nerd or that I’m a code monkey for the government. Usually, these answers are good enough to satisfy people’s curiosity, and I don’t have to go into nitty-gritty details. If people press me further, I go into the “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” routine that ceased to be funny…wait, no, it was never funny.
It’s not that I’m ashamed of what I do, persay…I mean, I work on the largest laser in the world. That’s kinda cool. And if all goes well, our project will help produce an uber-clean and safe source of nuclear power. Woot! This is awesome, until you realize that the people who decide what we do with our shiny laser are politicians. Given a choice between the last renewable energy source we’ll ever need and weapons research, well, what do you think they’ll pick? Sigh.
Previous to today, the best illustration of my work in popular media came from Spiderman 2. Specifically, Doctor Octopus’s science experiment. Supposedly, every time the laser fires, we produce a miniature star on Earth for a tiny fraction of a second, kinda like Doc Ock supposedly did.
Well, now we’ve finally finished the facility, I don’t have to resort to poor analogies. Our project’s made the big time. Observe:
Sigh. I can’t leave work soon enough.