The God of Straight Lines loves me

The wonderful Sgt. B is learning to play the pipes, and that reminded me of an episode of my youth. Well, two episodes. One I was too young to remember, but my mother (a very truthful person) assures me that I managed to sleep through my father's bagpipe class. This should have worried her more than it did (no, I'm not deaf).

The second occurred later in the early Pleistocene, when I was in college. Imagine, if you will, an electronics lab. There is a power supply for the eager students' electronics projects, and it emits a nice polyphonic hum whilst outputting volts. To myself and my buddy, also very fond of Celtic music, it sounded very much like the drones on the pipes. Naturally, we took advantage of this to sing the chanter part of favorite tunes.

This drove the lab instructor stark raving nuts. More nuts than we students usually managed. One day she snapped and told us to stop, and since it was 10% of our grade we did. Grumpily.

Now comes the Divine Intervention. For it was a pleasant, warm spring day, and Lo! The windows of the lab were open. And through those open windows, faint but unmistakable ... came the sound of bagpipes. I thought she was going to pull her hair out and beat us over the head with a variable capacitor. Fortunately my buddy looked out of the window and noticed a real live piper standing in the doorway of a nearby building. It turns out there was a piping competition going on inside and he was warming up before performing. What. Perfect. Timing. (The lab instructor quit after our class. I have no idea why.)