"The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous." - Shana Alexander
Most of the time, I feel like an ordinary person, with my kid and my husband and my ordinary house and so on. But then at other times, I go to places where I feel like I'm way more accomplished than those around me. This morning I went to the orientation and benefits program for Duke University regular employees. I took my knitting, because I had been told that it is a lot of history and "Why Duke is a great place to work!", and it was (and I'm knitting a Moebus Strip scarf in kool-aid tye-dye wool, so it's very compact and brainless). So, because the HR counsilor was trying to get us all to be friendly, she had us introduce ourselves with our names, departments, and one interesting thing about ourselves. This has come up before, so I usually give the stock answer of playing the bagpipes. Further on in the morning (this lasted 4.25 hours, by the way), we were talking about the other benefits of working at Duke - cheaper tickets to the zoo, car-buying discounts, whatever. I mentioned that I'm interested in working with the benefits office to get a TTA pass discount like UNC has (they pay $10 or less per month for a TTA pass, and Duke employees pay the full $64/month). I also knew the answers to some of the banking and payroll questions and one of the health care reimbursment questions that other new employees were asking, when the HR people didn't. I talked about RSS feeds somewhere in there, too. The point is that I don't think of myself as being exceptionally smart, but that I'm just an ordinary person, no smarter than the average joe on the street. But apparently I'm a bit above average, which just makes me wonder how some people function in the world.