...and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

I'm not normally that asshole who sits in other people's evolutionary neuroscience lectures to poke holes in their theories. Learn new ways to pick up dudes? Yes, but even I'm not mean enough to be specifically out to rain on anybody's parade.

Sometimes, though, I do take bait.

"Does anybody," the guest lecturer asked, "have any questions about my aforementioned premises before I explain the resulting research and conclusions we made from them?"

"I have a few," I returned, "You said we're trained to think that bad things ruin good things but that good things can not cure bad things... small gross things ruining somebody's appetite for a whole meal, and the phrase 'one bad apple ruins the barrel,' but couldn't these be old bred-in biases which help humans avoid pathogens?"

The man at the podium turned a little red and couldn't answer that. I felt bad after the second question and he muttered something about time, so he continued the lecture.

The grad student who ambushed me with, "I need to talk to you," directly after the lecture nearly scared me enough to duck back into the crowd and swim away.

"Do you work here?"

"Yes."

"What do you do?"

"Uh, well there is an automatic scheduler for outages of..."

"You're an engineer?"

"Yeah..."

"What's your background in neurology?"

"I don't..."

"You're more general biology?"

"Um..."

"Genetics?"

There was an awful silence.

"I program computers," I say, "I use to program robots."

"You have no relevant background at all?"

"No... no formal training."

"Well, your insights were really good. I'm going to give you my email, and I'd like to take yours, and if you have any more ideas I want you to tell us right away. I feel like a lot of your ideas might give us some angles for future research..."

I thought she was kidding at first, and then I realized she wasn't. I managed to keep a straight face through the email exchange and completely missed the fact that I was being invited to lunch. By the time I figured it out and returned to the room it was empty, and I could safely laugh my head off.

Running the conversation over in my head a summary sounded like this: "I, a respectable professional, find the somewhat logically derived and completely uneducated opinions which you have authoritatively announced to be intriguing. Please, if you have any more unproven ideas, do call my attention to them."

Isn't this the dream of everybody on the internet?