Coffee and Cell

I went pass the hospital Starbuck’s. It was closed. It closes early. I couldn’t help smiling when thinking about the guy a buy coffee from. We’re currently out of coffee at our office so every day I would go here and get a small bold. There’s a guy working there and he really likes trying to guess what I’m having. Today he was right: Small… bold…, he asked. He looked proud – smiling and nodding. I was a little surprised myself. I guess he sees a lot of costumers every day. Anyway, I like when people put that kind of attitude into their work. I was happy when I left with my coffee, and not only because of the coffee. He was happy – win win.

Finally, I got on the M2 shuttle from Longwood to Cambridge. I must have missed the first on by seconds 'cause I was waiting a long time. Anyway, the bus ended up pretty packed. I sat in the back and people started taking out reading material. Books, kindles, notes. Today, like most days I didn’t bring anything. I noticed a young woman taking out a copy of the Cell (on of the most prestigious scientific journals). I've actually never seen the actual journal before. Usually its just prints of specific papers, as the variety of such a journal covers so many different topics that only a very few papers an issue (if even any) would be relevant for their research. However, it looked fancy. Maybe a little bit like an exclusive arts and design journal. She turned to the first page and I stated thinking. Wow, this is what Harvard people do (she had a Harvard grad school bag). I was thinking about all the kind of knowledge on different topics you could get from reading the entire journal - although it might take at least a day to get through it). She looked at me. Ups, had I revealed myself? No, she was just looking around the bus, when out the window. As the ride went along nothing really happened to the journal. Still I was fascinated be the ambitions and work moral she put on the back of the bus.

We were almost at the Harvard Bridge crossing the Charles River towards MIT. Still, no page turning. It might have been a very interesting page or even a very complex one. Again no, that wasn't not the case I guess, 'cause until this point she might only have looked at the page once. She was observing other people on the bus just as much as I did - meaning getting no work done what so ever, like me. There was definitely difference in appearance, though. I was obviously not doing anything work-related. I guess the question about why you want to pull out one of the biggest and perhaps most complex scientific journals on the bus is redundant. Then all of a sudden she actually turned pages; three or four would be my guess (unfortunately all at ones). Now hitting a new page she found out that she was almost touching the woman sitting next to her with her boots. New interesting distraction from the journal: How could she arrange her feet to avoid that. She wasn’t tall enough to reach the ground from her seat so her feet were dangling on the bumpy roads of Boston. Tough one; it took her the rest of the ride to it figure out.