Splitters and groupers

Posted by Chuck at 7/18/2008 5:01 PM
Categories: uncategorized
Most days, I come home from work and want to post Carter's Line of the Day. Carter is my boss, and most days, about 3:00 pm when his caffeine level has reached a point that would explode most elephant's hearts, he gets into storytelling mode. But pretty much every day, the story is not exactly family friendly in language or theme, but today's skirts the edge of close enough that I think I can write about.

"You know what it is with these with these guys, why they can't get this work done?"

He was referring to people who can't complete a labor quote for a proposal because they get lost in minute details.

"Back when I was working as a biologist, there were two types of taxonomist; the kind that would see a house cat and say, 'that's a felis domesticus," then they would see a slight variation in the cat, which was maybe found in Chile, and call it felis domesticus chileaus. Then they'd find one in the Chilean Andes and call it felis domesticus chileus andeas.

"The same guys maybe see two jellyfish from different places and have to look to the mitochondrial level, to see a shape of a part of the animal's cell to say it's a different taxonomy. They were the splitters.

"Then there were the groupers, who would see and cat and say, 'can this this grey house cat from Chile and this orange cat from Sweden $%*k and produce viable offspring?' And if they can, the groupers call all of them felis domesitcus and call it finished, and look for the next project."
 
"And you know what about the splitters, every last one of them, when you study them, ... they were all potty trained too early."

 
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