taking a lie detector to school
“Coffee-maker conversations” are one of my favorite, somewhat-daily occurrences at work. Topics fly in from every direction and leave totally transformed. The conversation that arrived around lunch today was no less enjoyable.
It was based around healthly living, genetic conditions that affect health, and eating habits that affect health. I suppose you could say that a bunch of engineers were trying to argue within fields of study far beyond their perfect comprehension, but hey, that’s what engineers are for.
Someone, I’m still not sure who, keeps a portable blood pressure checker at their desk so we were taking turns seeing how close our imminent deaths were. My blood pressure was very low and within sane limits (I cannot remember exact numbers, but I’m still alive to write this down so it must be pretty good, and anyways it doesn’t matter to my point). However, something striked me and caught my attention.
In the middle of this light debate on health, my heart rate was 53 beats per minute. Fifty-three times per minute my heart was beating. Perhaps it is just my ignorance, but that seems very low. Low enough that the second hand on analog watches outpace my heart rate. Low enough to be mistaken for an immobile, slumbering sloth (assuming someone sees me through “heart-rate lenses”… err.. something like that). Low enough to possibly throw off the less-scrutinizing lie detector. Those hours of aerobic activity and weight training are paying off.
Maybe there is a job in my future at the C.I.A.