Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Depressing Career Moments




















For some unknown reason the numbers on a touch-tone phone are arranged with the smaller numbers up top, while calculators have the smaller numbers on the bottom. In graduate school and in my early career, I would often start dialing a touch-tone phone and inadvertently punch in the numbers as though I was using a calculator (rotary phones were still common so I wasn't using exclusively touch-tone). One of my most depressing career moments was when I realized that I was accidentally doing the opposite; the phone numbering scheme had become more automatic than the calculator's!

By the way, if you have fond memories of your HP calculators with Reverse Polish Notation and the best buttons ever, check out the museum of HP calculators. I'll substitute one of their pictures into this post if the curator will give me permission.

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