The builders in the office in which I was trying to work this afternoon. I shall refer to them as Stan and Ollie to maintain anonymity and because I don’t in fact know their names.
We have just moved labs from one building to another , this means lots of inconvenience for us and lots of ruined experiments because our lab is full of dust on account of the new building not yet being finished. It also means that their are lots of builder type people scurrying around doing building type things including the double act who were apparently supposed to be installing the new blinds in our office.
Now I am a grad student, I know nothing at all about the building work, who is involved, where they are supposed to be, what time they finish their work, etc nor do I really care. This basically means that if these two guys want to knock off half an hour early on a friday afternoon, the logical thing to do is to quietly leave, I will not notice, and to be honest I wouldn’t care anyway. The way to go about it is certainly not via the comedy routine that actually unfolded (I may have paraphrased the following slightly but this is basically the conversation that floated over my head)
Stan: (Switchs drill off) “Oh no the battery on the drill has run out” (big grin, significant nod to ollie)
Ollie: “Youre kidding, we won’t be able to finish our work as we don’t have any new batterys”
Stan: “Also we don’t have the Allen key we need to replace them”
Ollie: “It really is a shame, but we won’t be able to finish up here without the drill”
Stan: “We might as well finish up now and do the rest next week”
Ollie: “Because the drill isn’t working now”
Stan: “And it would take too long without the drill”
Ollie: “Which is no longer working on account of the battery having run out”
This went on for two or three more minutes along the same general lines until they seemed to be satisfied that all available witnesses (me) were completely clear on the fact that they were indeed diligent workers but the cruel hand of fate had contrived (via the drill) to rob them of the chance to fully complete their alotted task. The effect was slightly spoiled when one of them discovered that he actually had slightly more drilling to do anyway, which he attempted to do very quietly. As quiet drilling attempts go it was really quite impressive but still exceedingly audible.
Obviously they had me entirely convinced.