Nimish Batra, The Life and Times of

I remember something from college that makes me grin.

Usually Electronics or Electrical labs involving the Oscilloscope would be scheduled right after a lunch break. This would give me time to buy a Nestle Kit-Kat.

Now I don’t know who else noticed this, but there’s a triple layer wrapping on Kit-Kat (at least in India it is) – the outer red cover, the inner silver foil and in the middle, the golden hen – the butter paper.

Why in the world would the butter paper interest me?

Because, I almost always, without fail, would forget to buy any tracing paper in the starting of the week, and would be reduced to watching helplessly as the oscilloscope showed perfect readings on it’s stupidly green screen, and I would have nothing to record the readings on! [We are supposed to put the tracing paper on the screen and trace the curve shown, with the scale.]

Enter Kit-Kat. The butter paper (even though very much creased due to being wrapped around a bar of wafery chocolate) was only slightly more opaque than the tracing paper, and almost always the right size to take readings on!

Initially there were smirks from fellow experimenters. Then there was slight unease. Sometimes they tried to get the lab assistant to chuck me out – surprisingly it didn’t catch on. I guess no one liked Kit-Kat that much.

I don’t know why, but remembering that makes me ridiculously proud.

There was also a secret, patent pending method I had hit upon for creating graphs and traces for experiments you hadn’t yet done, but that is a matter for another blog post.

Posted on October 31st, 2009 under College, Nimish, Rant • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback