I Used to Do This

When I was a lad of 27 or so, my wife (then fiancé) was a Ph.D. student. We would occasionally go to department parties where I was the S.O. and would wander around chatting with students and faculty. I would see lots of people including those who had no idea that I had no idea about what they did. However, I was also the editor of my wife’s papers and articles. This gave me a detailed knowledge of her jargon plus a layman’s command of some of her field’s esoterica. Thusly, I could take a visiting grad student, or newly minted Ph.D. student, and bullshit the hell out of them. Some never did figure out that I was just stringing words together, pulling things out of my butt.

This caught me flack from Jenn.

At least I don’t do it anymore. For one thing, there’s a huge difference between a graduate student’s S.O. screwing around with other grad students and a professor’s husband doing it. For another, I don’t know enough to successfully bullshit a professor. Alas.