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You're absolutely right; there are an awful lot of people who would rather waste time on silly gossip or other trivialities than exercise their minds at all.

I know what you mean. Where I work, it is quite refreshing. We are in an open room in the center of the building, it is called "The Dungeon" since there are no windows or anything, plus my co-worker is also a science fiction nut and is writing a book too. We had esoteric debates like the idea of alternate universes and one time we were talking about the polio vaccine that was developed by Salk here in Pittsburgh back in the 1950's. I quipped in, being an alternate history buff, to what it would be like had things been different to where they went down a different path such as a mechanic or electronic path to where we would end up with a portable iron lung suit. My co-worker, also a huge Star Wars fan, said, "cool! Then we would have a lot of Darth Vaders running around" since in Star Wars, Darth Vader's suit was basically a portable iron lung. Hmmm, a 1950's version of Darth Vader's suit. B-) We run the gambit from the Pittsburgh Steelers to cartoons to quantum physics. B-) One lady joined our room, she is an avid online role playing gamer and science fiction buff, her boyfriend is much deeper into science fiction, she says, we are refreshing since out in the office cubicles, it is nothing but gossip.

My co-worker came up with an interesting twist as well. We were talking about "Space: 1999" where the Moon leaves Earth orbit, goes into a black hole and ends God knows where. At work, we are allowed to listen to the radios on our walkmans all day but there are times we turn them off, we're both burned out on politics (he's conservative too) and just BS. He wondered that "if we had our radios off and the Moon left Earth orbit, how long would it take for us to find out?" Remember we are in a windowless room in the middle of a huge building, the men's room is a walk out the door, no windows you can look out on the way. If you go further, there are windows but on one end, you see the roof of part of the building, not much else and the other side, unless you go into meeting rooms, you can only see the road. My answer to him is "we will find out when we turn our radios on and we hear 9-11 style 'wall-to-wall and treetop tall' news coverage on the Moon leaving Earth's orbit." BTW, we can't get AM radio either so we listen to the FM talker here in Pittsburgh and occasionally the Christian station too. He replied, "possible unless it triggers some sort of earthquake" although I wonder if something even like that would trigger one here in Pittsburgh. I think we came to the conclusion that we would find out from two ways, either we look up and it is not there and we know the Moon is a supposed to be there and it's not or we turn our radios on.

We do have a lot of off-the-wall talk like that, it is kind of refreshing, it beats talking about "how was 'Friends' yesterday." B-)

We do have a lot of off-the-wall talk like that, it is kind of refreshing, it beats talking about "how was 'Friends' yesterday." B-)

Wow, now THAT sounds like a job I'd actually look forward to each day!

As for the "Friends" thing, I once worked in a similar 'open room' type setup (although we did have windows) ... our desks were about 2 inches apart, because they had nowhere to put us at that time, so they shoved us together in a corner. There were about 6 of us, and all the others spent almost the entire shift talking about the doings of the characters of "Beverly Hills 90210" and similar shows. I was so happy when after a few months they expanded and had room to put us into semi-individual cubes. The only time in my life I can say I was actually happy to be moved into a cube ;-)