What You See Isn't What You Get

Conjure up your stereotype of a “surfer dude.” Now add to that image, scruffiness, granola and torn LL Bean shoes. Also, bedeck him with a personality that is seemingly unaware and always three seconds behind everyone else. Have it? I met a guy like this last night.


We were outside the Celtic watching the first snow flurry when I asked him about the cast on his right foot and how he came to break it.

 He answers. “Sheesh…some fat guy fell on it while I was fighting him and his three friends, sort of tackled me by falling down onto my legs. I was wasted and didn’t know it was hurting till six hours later. It sort of sucks, having to limp about at work and stuff.”


I ask him where does he work, thinking it was some sort of job requiring that he stand all the time.


“I work with a scientist. We make new cancer therapies.”

In my mind I say the word “bullshit“ to myself as he tells me this story. God, another peon totally inflating his carriage and position in this world. There are thousands of them!

“Ok, let’s flesh this out a bit more” I say to myself. I know something of cancer, sickness and medical advances. Let’s see how long this dimwit can sustain this fiction.


“What do you do? Does it involve new chemo treatments or radiation? I ask.


“No, no…We extract T cells from a patient’s body, change the DNA via a virus carrier, to increase their targeting onto the specific cancer they have. Then we grow them in a medium…sorta increase the cell counts by ten to twenty fold. We then replace these super T cells back into the patient. We inject a Rambo army of T cells onto the cancer.”


“T cells? Viral manipulation of DNA? “Growing medium?” I stand there shocked hearing these words coming from, what seems, a pothead.


“What school did you go to? You have a degree in biology? I ask?


“Yeah…I got a bio degree…(snort)…from Rhode Island College” he says.


I then ask, “Do you remember a Ted…”


“…Duluk?” He says, cutting me right off and answering correctly. Ted Duluk is a biology professor that I knew one time. And he worked at RIC.


I stand there still, not believing what I’m looking at. This guy looks too fucked up to be able to tie his own shoes. What bio engineer looks like this?


Later on, I remembered the old movie “The Absent Minded Professor.” I then realize that this guy, who was much younger than me, was probably his generation’s version of this goofy personage.