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Who Put That Mu There?

I was in Manhattan again yesterday for that god awful actuarial seminar I�ve been going to. Given my options for lunch partners, I have begun bolting out the door when the instructor calls �time for lunch� so I can get to the elevator first and have a 15 floor head start, just in case one of the friendly mathematicians decides to guilt me into spending an hour talking awkwardly with them about theoretical calculus. I�ll admit that theoretical calculus is one of my favorite subjects in the world, but there�s so many more interesting things to do during lunch in the big city than sit around being geeky.

Yesterday, however, my plans were thwarted. I bolted for the elevator, and just as the doors were about to close and ensure my safe get away, I heard a voice. It was him� SuperGeek, the head geek, the geek to end all geeks, the guy who inspired my Actuarial Poetry. �Hold the elevator!!� Shit. Shit. Shit.

I didn�t learn anything during our first session of this seminar because I spent the 8 hours staring at this guy with a quizzical expression. He went from gnawing on his pen, to twisting back and forth in his chair very rapidly, to chewing on his shirt collar. He reminded me of a hyperactive Saint Bernard. On our first session, the air conditioner had been turned off in the building in preparation for our arrival, and it was approaching 100 degrees in our cramped little conference room. In addition to the wet spot from the spit on his collar, large sweat rings began to appear under his arms, which he noticed at one point when he looked down to inspect a drop of drool that fell from his slack jaw onto his stomach. He reacted as if he saw a tarantula nestled in his belly button with its 3,500 children. He jumped up in his seat and wore an expression of shock as he frantically scanned the faces in the room to see who had noticed that his body was capable of excreting moisture from his armpits. Luckily everyone was being polite, both to him and to our instructor, as they all faced forward and listened intently to the Greek being spoken to us. Except for me, of course. I sat staring directly at SuperGeek, tapping a pencil against my forehead and trying desperately to figure out what egg he may have been hatched from.

Although SuperGeek and his band of faithful followers managed to get in my escape pod, I flew out the front door of the building when we reached the lobby before they had a chance to invite me to lunch. I practically ran down the streets of New York, but I heard them about a block behind me having a loud debate about the appropriate use of the UDDY assumption when modeling an annuity. I was confident that I was the only person in the world to voluntarily eat at McDonald�s on a rare trip to Manhattan with its quaint bistros and excellent cuisine, so I didn�t think much of their tracking me to my lunch destination. I assumed they would have kept walking to the eatery on the corner with the forest green awnings and inviting menu. I should have known that if there were any other group of people who�d make the same boring lunch choice in the face of so many more appealing options, it would be a group of actuaries.

I ducked into McDonald�s and got in the line of chaos with the Polish, Korean, Swedish, and Japanese tourists frantically looking in their bilingual dictionaries for the meaning of �Super Size It�. A few moments later, I heard heavy breathing behind me, mixed with that sucking sound people make when they�re about to lose a little drool out of the side of their mouth, and I knew it was either SuperGeek or one of those aliens that gave Sigourney Weaver such trouble a few years back. He said to me in an inappropriately loud voice, �You know, if we were living out our random future lifetimes according to DeMoivre�s theory of mortality, then those of us that eat at McDonald�s would probably have an extra point zero zero zero one mu.�

That�s actuarial humor for, �we�re going to die from eating this stuff.�

The only thing more disturbing than having my senses attacked with this gibberish in public, is that I understood his joke. And I laughed. I laughed not because his joke was funny. I laughed because he used the wrong theory of mortality... Everyone knows there is no mu in DeMoivre�s theory. Jeesh, where�d this guy come from? Although a part of me desperately wanted to point out his blunder, I decided at the last minute to keep it to myself and politely grin in his direction. There�s only so far my geekiness will take me in public, even when no one around me speaks English.