The other day, someone at work asked me (not entirely out of the blue), if I “had anyone useful” in my family.

Without missing a beat I answered: “No, they are all scientists.”

Because it’s true, at least in the context of the conversation, which made the question more like do you have anyone with skills that are useful to ordinary people in your family. I mean, they contribute to the sum of human knowledge, and arguably do important things, but hardly useful skills, such as being able to cut hair (like Nina’s husband) or even fixing a Windows XP machine full of viruses that you stupidly downloaded (like me. er, the fixing part, not the downloading of viruses part).

“But wait,” I added, “it gets worse, because I grew up in a company town, where the ‘company’ was a federal laboratory, and everyone who lived in the town were also scientists.”

Later, when I was explaining this conversation to my mum (who didn’t seem to find it as inherently funny as I did), she pointed out to me that there are also engineers in Los Alamos.

“Well, they can be useful.” I said.

“Not those engineers.”

Mum seems to hold engineers in the same esteem as people who live in Melbourne (“seriously,” I can imagine her saying, “if you are in Australia, why wouldn’t you live in Sydney?”).

I know this attitude sort of filtered down to me, unfortunately, because early on when I met my friends in New York who also worked at The Company, I said with some disdain that I wasn’t an engineer, when one of them described us as a group of engineers. I have always preferred the term “programmer” or “coder” (which is actually different from what my friends do), although I do have to admit my job title was “software engineer” for those six years in New York.

They are pretty cool engineers though. They do things like make the processors that go into all of the next generation video game consoles. (When the dust settles from this round of the Console Wars, I don’t know if Sony or Nintendo will be left standing, but either way The Company stands to make a tidy profit either way). More importantly, they are cool people, who know how to have a good time and be good friends.

I told my photography teacher what my friends did once, and she thought those GPUs The Company was making were a waste of resources that could have been more appropriately allocated. Seriously though, who is she kidding, she is a professional photographer. What is she contributing to the world that is so awesome that she can go around judging other people? There is nothing wrong with being a photographer, but there is everything wrong with being judgemental and condescending.

e and d came out for a few days. I'm sad because now that they are gone again I realize it will be a long time before I see them again. Tell me again why I can't just bring my friends to Australia with me? e said she would try to come out within a couple of years. It's going to be hard getting used to not being able to meet up with her and Jack after herding practice to go for a hike in New Jersey.

On the bright side, It was great to see them, and I was pleased that e finally got to meet my mum. The first day they were here we went skiing at Brighton. d said that he actually liked skiing so he may be back for more at some point.

That night we had Posole (prepared by myself) and invited Clare and Val over as well so we had an interesting discussion about whether or not Biology could ever be a predictive science or not. We also discussed the stupidity of large organizations, such as IBM and LANL, and how open systems are safer to closed ones.

Everyone had seconds, and some even had thirds. Right before I left New York, e told me that she likes Mexican food... all these years I thought she was just being polite and eating the food that I make for Enchilada Night. Seriously.

The second day we took a drive to Park City to see two photography galleries. We drive through the mountains and took a number of pictures and had lunch at somebodyorother's Grill. That night e and d took us to the Red Iguana, where we had more good Mexican food.

I just had the most retarded meeting ever. This is actually an accomplishment, as all our meetings are fairly retarded. My manager spent the hour talking about expense accounts, and security. It's amazing how cumbersome something can become when upper management works at making the bureaucracy impenetrable; this appears to be their job.

I've never gone on business travel and I have never had to expense something while working at The Company. The only time I did have to expense something it was when I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and I asked my boss if we could have another camel for the office. My boss told me to go to R'Books and use the department charge code. When I got there, I didn't have to provide any proof that I had the authorization to use that charge code either.

I suppose that was before all the procurement scandals though. Things would be different now.