Two anecdotes about my professor-boss (not the cowboy)

“This is my wife, Jane,” he said.

“Oh, hello,” I said. “It’s so nice to finally meet you!”

“Hello,” she said. Then she turned to my prof-boss somewhat accusingly and said, “She’s beautiful.”

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“Can you come to my office and fix my fax machine?” said my prof-boss.

“Sure,” I said, went to his office, and reloaded the paper into the correct slot in the machine. “As a tenured faculty member in Electrical Engineering,” I said, “you clearly are neither mechanically inept nor lazy, so I can only assume you call me in to fix your small technologies in an effort to be endearing. But in light of these four flights of stairs between you and me, I really think it’s time you made that Ph.D. work for you.”