My office smells

I walked in the door of my office this morning, having trod across the Old Aberdeen landscape. Rotting leaves, frozen ponds, barking dogs. Having heaved one sack each of papers to be marked and proposals to be considered out of the trusty pack, I plopped the laptop onto its stand, connected a few wires, and went to do my office pūjā while it whirred into its usual bewildered state. Pungent incense from a Viet grocery in Orlando waved at the Tārā and raven on the door, at the various manifestations of the Three Jewels over my desk. A postgrad across the hallway looked a bit startled.

Incense stuck firmly into a ricepot, I ambled down the hall with a kettle and a filthy glass pot. I scrubbed the coffee stains out of the pot, filled the kettle, retreated into my office and fired up the wee espresso machine kindly sold to me by another lecturer. Now my office really stinks: incense and coffee smells pour out from under my door and fill up the whole hallway.

Either my neighbours are really polite, or it smells like home to them too. Not sure which. I know somebody must think de-odorizers are a good idea, but who?

Pigeonholes

For the sake of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research, I submitted myself to a course on project management a fortnight ago. It was good and bad. There were some exceedingly useful tools for actually projecting a project: where the crises might fall, how to distribute resources. There were some bogus bits, like the the instructor’s defensive reaction to being teased about team-building exercises. And there was the intriguing, taken with much salt, reference to the Myers-Briggs personality type exercise. Divination systems interest me, and this looks like a divination system with all the right features: it’s just complex enough to make everyone feel special and well-served when they get their analysis, rather like the Western star sign + Chinese star sign combination books that were around a few years back. There are 16 types, though the distribution is uneven.

So I went and found an online testing service to see what I was, and then tested myself again to see if the results were consistent. They were, though I’m sure any such online test would be scoffed at by the professionals; apparently I’m an INTJ, though with the percentages on the test the only factor on which I stuck out was the N. (I 56 N 62 T 01 J 33, for later reference) The other delightful thing about this system is that it is apparently based on Jung’s three axes (introvert/extrovert, intuition/sense, thinking/feeling) with one more thrown in (perceiving/judging). Levi-Strauss would be thrilled.

Does this mean that we now have a new form of metadata for blogs?

But what I really want to know is this. The various web pages dedicated to M-B personality types all list famous people who fit that type (I was deeply gratified to find Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson in my 16th of the human race). Clearly, though, neither of those esteemed gentlemen was alive to take the test. How were they pigeonholed? Could I invent a nom de plume, force them into fame, kill them off and then discover what their MB type was? (Much to my shame I find that Arnold Schwarzenegger is also apparently an INTJ. Was that Arnie in the Terminator, or Arnie in Sacramento?)