Nehaveigur

For three years, while working towards my PhD, I shared an office with eight to ten other students and postdocs. The office with its gray carpet was on the second floor of a brick building from the 1960s, the windows looking out over a gray parking lot under a gray English sky. It wasn’t an inspiring setting, but it was a great lab. The people I shared the office with were the best company I could’ve wished for.

One of them who stood out for the way he dressed, looked and acted. Sergey was from Belarus and spoke with a heavy Russian accent. No matter the season, he dressed in tight-fitting black T-shirts and black shorts. He didn’t deviate from this even when everyone else dressed up, wearing suits and ties for one of the formal dinners at one of the university’s colleges. He once explained to me that he had considered all dress options and that this was the only rational choice. He took science, and its requirement to conduct experiments, very seriously and didn’t see why he should limit this attitude to the lab.

One winter, he returned to Belarus and I didn’t see him for a long time. The next time I saw him, he had lost a lot of weight and didn’t look well. He told me that he had experimented with sleeping in the snow of the Belarussian forest and eating raw meat that he had caught himself. He got food poisoning and he had to spend a few days in hospital to recover.

Another time, he invited me to a barbecue he and some of his friends were organizing. Since we were in England, the weather didn’t cooperate and we couldn’t get a fire started. While most of us gathered around the soggy barbecue trying to decide what to do next, he got a can of gasoline and sprayed it on the fire. This resulted in a fireball which only stopped expanding once it reached my face. For some time after that, I didn’t have eyebrows and what looked like a bad sunburn.

The atmosphere at many English universities at the time, and maybe still, was nurturing for mavericks, oddballs and originals. For better but mostly for worse, it’s the opposite in the corporate America of 2024 to which I belong for now.