I blame Halloween...

When a lab or office here at the University decides to upgrade equipment or get rid of broken or out of date machines, they put them in the hallway. There the slumping, rejected machines sit for weeks, a veritable widget graveyard, while people like me pick our way through them, sometimes turning a corner too fast to avoid them and finding ourselves face down in their knobbed and dialed corpses. Until eventually they go away. I'm not sure why they have to sit there for so long before they’re hauled away. It's possible that it's protocol. It’s possible that the building maintenance crew must give the vultures enough time to pick over the carcasses. Perhaps it's a battle of wills. Maybe proper procedure is to call someone to arrange for a large receptacle in which to toss the aforementioned unwanted things until someone can come and wheel it out to an even bigger receptacle. Maybe the researchers don't know they're supposed to do this or don't care. The maintenance crews find it frustrating and disrespectful so as punishment they make people trip over the stuff in their hallways for about a month before they finally take care of it. I know that's what I'd do. Absent-minded genius, my ass. Clean up your mess, professor. Well in my many walks through the dim and less accessible hallways, I've seen some very interesting looking machines. I like to imagine what they do. Call it a guessing game. Propulsion chamber? Viscosity leveller? Finger remover? Fitzelpopping thermoplasmic fuselating farfelhoffer?

But the other day I nearly tripped over a machine that outright terrified me, because I'm damn near positive it was a suicide machine. Remember the suicide machine? Jack Kevorkian? Dr. Death? I did a report on it in like sixth grade or something. Maybe it was high school. But I have a vague recollection of the machine and this “machine” in the hallway bears an eerie resemblance. (A quick bit of research on line and I find the actual name is thanatron. Ok…this thing in the hallway looks a LOT like a thanatron.) Furthermore, it doesn't even look like it's something that belongs in a highly advanced research university lab. It looks crude. It’s pretty small, about the size of a laptop computer with four raw wood boards that form the frame. In the middle of the top of the frame on what looked like some sort of spring is a syringe. (Some responsible party apparently saw to it that the needle was disposed of through the proper channels.) I will not pretend to be one of those people who can understand the inner workings of things, but I see a crude wood frame with a syringe, a hook, and a spring and I'm sorry, but I see suicide machine. And of course the mental gymnastics begin. If we consistently refer to objects as dying or dead... For example, "My phone died." Or "my computer died." Then if a thanatron ceases to work, has it not then died? And would that be considered... suicide? Noooooo! I have way too much to get done today to jump down this little rabbit hole. I should probably get back to work anyway. Hey now, don't be sad. I'll be back. No. No, you put down that suicide machine right now!