I recently spent a while unwrapping and eating 64 slices of American cheese about a hundred individually-wrapped connectors, which is a pretty mindless way to spend a few minutes, although it’s better than mindless paperwork or training. Because I lost at lab chicken. Twice in one day, in fact.

Lab chicken, or some variant of it, is an informal game that’s been played out in all places I’ve worked. In its current form, it consists of trying to get someone else to do some tedious task of yours, through either luck or some cunning non-Baldrickian plan (in that it actually works), but not through overt threats or bribery. To the uninitiated, it might seem like an exercise in procrastination, but procrastination in and of itself does not usually invite participation and competition. (Procrastination is often its own reward — not doing an unpleasant or silly task, and often enough, the powers that be change their mind and cancel or scale back what was required. Plenty of positive reinforcement, even without the dispensing of food pellets.)

It’s common practice in our group that when you order something, you are responsible for unpacking it. This usually works quite well, because if you order something you are often the one who is going to use it — a replacement part, flange for a vacuum system, optics or something related — you ordered it because you need it to move along with your project. But sometimes you order parts in large quantities, because you are thinking ahead to the next several months of assembly. So the box may sit on your desk, waiting, until someone actually needs one of the components, and then they are forced to actually unwrap the rest and put them away. That’s what happened to me. I needed a certain connector and was handed the box of “many,” and ended up putting them away.

My other “loss” was when I went to sit down to assemble my little project. Someone had stored several cardboard boxes in the space below the lab bench where I was going to work. Taking a single box down to the recycling bin is a waste of time, so the challenge here is to pile the boxes up until it gets cleared. Since we had some sneetches coming through later on, the pile had to be eradicated. So I got stuck with that task, too.