What do grad students and mail carriers have in common?
I was reading a great article about marmosets at lunch today when I stumbled on something you all have to read. I know there are jokes about grad students going postal, but I couldn't believe how often it seems to really happen! Is it that graduate school attracts people like this, or does the stress make them that way?
7 comments:
Wow, interesting reading! I vastly prefer the marmoset article (which IS really cool). You pose a good question about graduate students. I bet it's some of both. I like to think that no amount of stress would make me gun people down (Ed, I do think you're safe) but Nate's step-father was reading a disturbing book that claims that 10% of the population of the United States is sociopathic. The book defined that as both having no empathy with other people and deriving a sense of pleasure from causing pain to others. Hard to believe it's TEN PERCENT, but I guess those people are out there and odds are some of them become grad students. I don't know .. maybe it's a false comforting sense of 'us' and 'them' but I find it hard to imagine that a person with much empathy for others would do what those people did. Extreme stress and lack of empathy...? Though grad student killers occur, it's very rare. If anything, grad school is proof that most people can undergo extreme stress (at least of the grad school type) and NOT be killers. I don't know much about sociopaths. Are they born that way or is it a sucky life? (Both contribute, I would imagine.)
So why don't you hear of dentists or hairdressers going on killing sprees? Not sure, but it probably has to do with the power wielded by the advisor in the feudal academic system. I've sure heard some awful advisor stories, and they do have an awful amount of power over the grad student's future. So I guess I'm saying grad school sometimes places sociopaths in pressure-cooker situations under the misanthropic auspices of heartless sadists and -- well -- (I'm really getting into this post because Nate just left for a few days and I'm distracting myself...) Well, anyway...
It's still a very small number. The one math dude at Stanford is famous because he really thought it was justified and years in jail didn't change that.
The marmoset article is really cool.
Why would female marmosets carry chimeric offspring less?
TT, I had the same question. It seems like the males get born as twins but the females don't.
I have a particular problem with letter carriers. I don't really understand why they are more prone to "going postal" as a result of events at work; I would hypothesize instead that there is some pre-existing behavioral condition that for some unknown reason is correlated with an affinity for pursuing a postal career (or failing to secure another line of work).
Having lived on a number of carrier routes in 3 states, I've dealt with a variety of carriers, and none have been very impressive. The one who covered both my parents' home and my high school(who looked like Alfred E. Neuman of "Mad" fame) was known to frequently cram oversized (even those labeled "do not bend") objects into the mailbox. In warm weather, we students would sit on the curb outside of the HS during lunch, and he would pull up in the little mailmobile so quickly and so close to the curb that we'd have to fly out of the way to save our toes. He'd mutter "damn kids" as he carried the box of mail into the building. The icing on the cake was that he ran over and killed my friend's cocker spaniel EVEN THOUGH it was on a leash and under the control of her mother.
The femailman who services my current apartment is perhaps not as deadly but is equally as unpleasant. Granted, we have a small wall-imbedded box, but even bill-sized envelopes and bendable things like magazines REPEATEDLY are crumpled - 4 or 5 times a week. It's like she places a bill in there and then tries again with a second object that catches the side of the upright bill. Instead of trying reposition the second object, she just forces it in there until she hears the satisfying sound of paper crumpling and ripping. Once, upon finding an essentially shredded flyer (luckily of not much importance), I taped it to the wall next to the mailboxes with a note that said "please be more careful with our mail". The response? A note that said "check your mail every day". Useless. Damage has not been limited to junk mail, but I'm hesitant to complain to the carrier or the postmaster for fear of retaliation.
Coincidentally (but hey, Lisa combined them in a post!), I also do not care much for monkeys. Although the incident described below actually has not affected my opinion (which has been fixed for quite a while now), I do want to share a story about a marmoset.
I was in Peru in March and had the opportunity to hold a tame marmoset (which was WAY inside of my 20-yard buffer of comfort regarding monkeys and clowns). Luckily it did not bite me (of all the zoological interactions I could have, bites and scracthes from primates are very high on my list of fears/neuroses), but it did "scold" me for no apparent reason. Then, it pooped on my arm. I think it was tame because the locals killed and ate its mother.
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