People here do not like eye contact

I am 21 years old and on a good day at work can be found wearing an un-tucked polo shirt and some khaki pants. On a bad day I am wearing a t-shirt with toothpaste stains and jeans with holes around the back-pockets (why do holes form here?). I am tall and skinny with a scruff of unkempt curly hair. I am not, by any standards, an intimidating looking person. Certainly in a professional corporate setting there would be no reason to look towards the floor, or the wall, or back and forth repeatedly between the two in some kind of frightened attempt to avoid eye contact, when passing the likes of me in the hallway. And yet this is exactly what I see.

I understand that these are not normal people, that they have PhD's in things like Physics and Materials Science and that for these they have sacrificed some of the more sophisticated social skills such as knowing when to draw someone a map and when to simply say "the bathroom is around the corner," but I thought that a head nod or simple "hello" when passing a fellow co-worker would be within everyone heres ability.

I was mistaken.

The lights went out

I am sitting in my cubicle and I have a spreadsheet open that I'm typing away at. All of a sudden the lights go out. We have lights which are activated by motion and which are meant to continue to stay on as long as somebody is in the room. Apparently sitting in a cubicle tapping at a keyboard in front of a 1246 row spreadsheet is not considered motion.

Fair enough.

What do you do??

Once I tell someone that I work at JFS, they will inevitably ask me on of two questions:

Question 1: "Oh! Do you know PersonX?"

To this I always end up saying: "Hmmm....no I dont think so...it's a pretty big place..."
They will then be disapointed and walk away.

Question 2: "Oh! Cool! What do you do?"

To this I will attempt to succintcly summarize the obscure machinery and methods which I use to create objects that perhaps 1000 people in the world could recognize as useful.
They will then be disapointed and walk away.


There is also sometimes a third reply.

Question 3: "Oh! You work there? How can you possibly justify that? Do you know how much pollution and health hazards that company has caused?"

I will then be disapointed and walk away.

Where do you work???

I have a job as a "Technical Aide" at a multinational company which invests heavily in scientific research and development. I will refer to this company as JFS, which is an acronym for the phrase "Jamal Fucking Sucks". I will refer to it as JFS because acronyms are everyone's favorite thing to do at my job, and because Jamal fucking sucks.

A typical conversation:

-Hey Dave, did you get the LIVS on those PDL-P's yet?
-No not yet, the PR-650 was down, but I took some BF and EL shots.
-What about PL?
-No I didnt get to PL's yet but I can when I look at the WNF6. Hey did you get any word about when we'll get some more block ITO?
-Yeah I called MMD, they said it'll be in next week along with the NDP and some more GGD
-Nice.

This is not an exaggeration.

40% of the time people will not know nor care to know what the acronyms they use daily stand for.