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Between planning for a root canal and preparing for a superstinky Friday teleconference with NASA, it hasn’t exactly been the best week for blogging, has it? No. Hasn’t been the best week at all.

I was so close to ending it on a high note, though, but I just couldn’t get my butt out of the office. It was a good teleconference, for a change, with new test data coming in from NASA that makes us all go “Huh!” but like a good “Huh,” the kind that means something like “I think I’d almost rather work on this problem than go home and watch Battlestar Galactica and fall asleep on the couch while drinking beer before noon,” except come on, let’s be realistic, funky crack data isn’t that interesting. Still, with the prospect of scientific discovery before me and, more importantly, real actual data and not just the promise of some non-screwed-up potential for data and, most importantly, several cups of too-sweet coffee to compensate for yet another late late night, I was in a nearly manic post-successful-telecon mood, now with 50% more BOING!

Boing!

But wait. Something’s not right. Something big and clunky and golden is not right, as in, not here. My big, magnificent HP 49G+ is not here! It was sitting right on my desk when I left last night — and I remember actually contemplating bringing it home so I could use it while working late, only to dismiss it with an “Eh, I’ll just use Excel” — and now it is gone. As is its leather case, which was stuck behind my computer monitor. As is, bizarrely enough, it’s wee, pocket-sized companion, my HP 9G!

Who the hell steals calculators?

Here at Georgia Tech, in addition to buildings that occasionally pump raw sewage back into the hallway and ground floor offices that get rained on in a four story building (as my advisor recently discovered for himself…the rats must be rerouting the piping or something), we have signs posted on the doors all the time advising us to BOLO for an “Office Creeper.” This is not some kind of potted plant gone awry, but a friendly neighborhood crackhead of one variety or another who strolls around campus, cruises through office buildings, and steals shit. Lucky for me, my office has an auto-locking door and it sure as hell was locked when I left last night. Unlucky for me, in addition to crackheads that can fly (see: Kona Calderra that got lifted from a 3rd floor balcony), I am now the victim of crackheads that can walk through walls, or perhaps crackheads that also work here in blue uniforms. Hell if I know, I just know I don’t have a freaking calculator anymore.

I’m an engineer, not a doctor, Jim! How am I supposed to be truly nerdtacular without a calculator? (Perhaps now would be a good time to learn how to use one of those collectibles in my drawer.)

What’s really weirding me out is not just that I was so close to taking the machine home with me (which I haven’t done since I finished taking classes 2 years ago) and sparing it from its crackhead doom, but I just happened to check out the latest HP lineup online last night and got the gadget bug, bad (surprise surprise). A friend of mine IM’d me last night complaining about the alien HP calculator she had to borrow from her dad for a test that prohibited the use of graphing calculators like her TI-whatever-piece-of-junk-fake-calculator. I hopped onto the HP website to point her to an appropriate tutorial or manual, since HP nerds speak a slightly different math than the TI world, and lo! and behold, there it was: the HP 50G, the flagship nerdbox of RPN thunkery! Hell, they don’t even support the 49G+ anymore (given some of its glitches, they’re doing their best to forget that generation ever existed); looking at their product lineup skipping straight from the retrograde 48GII to the new 50G, I started to feel like a red-headed stepchild of nerddom. I coveted the new 50G.

And now, I’m in the market for a new calculator, it would seem. Despite the fact that I plan on abandoning this technical career path any month now and would probably be served just fine by the stalwart (but not all that nerdsexy) 33S, you just can’t rule out the possibility that I’ll need all that honking memory for something at some point in the future, can you? And it’s just. so. big. And size matters. It really does.

I sent an email out to my entire lab on the off chance that someone thoughtlessly borrowed it without leaving a note — and decided to grab the second calculator just to be on the safe side, and put the 49G in its leather case for safe keeping — but there’s still no response and that Buy Now button is still staring at me, prompting a little nervous sweat while I IM’d my drinking buddy:

No one is replying to my group email saying they borrowed my calculator. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to wait before ordering a new one.

An hour. :-P

Starting now? Or since I sent the email? Or since I noticed them missing???

I figured starting now. It’s obvious you’re obsessed with the HP50g anyway… How much does it cost?

$150

That’s a lot of PBR.

Yeah. I could tell you exactly how much PBR if I HAD A FUCKING CALCULATOR.