Getting on Base

Have you ever had one of those days? The kind of day that starts out pleasant enough, and you get to work and you start having a conversation and you say something like, "1 +1 = 2," but then the person you're talking to says, "No it doesn't. 1 + 1 = 10." That strikes you as a little bit odd, but it's not all that important so you go on with your day. 

A little while later you're in a meeting and someone's giving a PowerPoint presentation on some boring engaging topic and everyone's following along (or at least not being terribly obvious about checking their phones). Suddenly a slide shows up on the screen that reads, "1 + 1 = 10," in big, bold characters. You see that slide and you think about it for a minute, work up a bit of courage, and say, "Uh, I'm pretty sure 1 + 1 = 2." 

And of course everyone looks at you like you just landed from Mars, and the person giving the slide says, "No, we've thought a lot about this and have decided that 1 + 1 = 10." So you start running back through all those years of math you took in school and, no, you're still pretty sure that 1 + 1 = 2 and so you start to explain why you think 1 + 1 = 2, doing searches on Google and generally trying to muster whatever evidence you can -- which isn't much because you've always just assumed that 1 + 1 = 2 and that everyone would agree that 1 + 1 = 2 so why would you ever need to collect evidence to prove it? But they're not buying what you're saying, and you're not buying that 1 + 1 is anything but 2, and so you walk away from the meeting thinking that aliens must've landed the night before and performed some selective lobotomies.

Now you're back at your desk, and suddenly you start getting emails that basically boil down to further arguments as to why 1 + 1 does not equal 2. At first you respond politely, and then you respond not so politely, and then you stop responding at all, figuring that the entire freaking planet, or at least that portion with which you interact, has been lobotomized. Dealing with it is just way too exhausting.

Now you're annoyed. So you seethe for awhile, but then a thought occurs to you: maybe, just maybe, your entire world has decided to convert to binary while you weren't paying attention. Base 10 has been traded for base 2. If we're working in binary, rather than base 10, 1 + 1 does equal 10. That would explain why everyone is arguing that 1 + 1 = 10. We're using binary!

But about two nanoseconds after that you realize that's absolutely insane. You're not a computer programmer. No one you work with is a computer programmer. There is absolutely no way that these people have decided to operate in binary. They're just bloody wrong.

So you call it a day and seek out alcohol.

I've had days like that.