Perhaps I have to say that, as I have science and engineering degrees, but at heart, I am a country boy, and I love the song, "A country boy can survive".
Should be "of the world in academe".
Texas born, and brought up all over the country by Tennessee born military parents. And I'm a redneck :)
I worked at Oak Ridge National Lab for a few months after I got out of the military. I was delivering mail, getting to talk with some of the best and the brightest in the nation. I also picked up spare change doing things like tuning their cars, changing the oil, stuff such as that.
Funniest experience of all at the Lab. This was after the comet strike on Jupiter. I'm at one of the physics labs, looking at a bulletin board. Someone pinned up a bunch of pictures of the strikes on the planet, and this gentleman comes up to me and asks what I do. I tell him that I deliver mail, and that leads him to ask "Do you know what you're looking at?" The tone was kind of snide, but you should have seen the look on his face when I answered him.
I can't recall the exact words - it's been ten years now, but it was something along the lines of "That's fragment Alpha, striking the planet at such and such location. The force of the blast was approximately 150 megatons, determined by the flash of the blast, etc, etc. The impact zone was aproximately XXX in size, etc etc etc." I gave him all the technical details of the comet strike, how many fragments, total energy expended, you name it.
He slowly shook his head and asked "What is a man like you doing delivering mail?" I told him that it wasn't as boring as some other things I could be doing...didn't have the heart to tell him that I read the answer word for word from the captions under the pictures.