Humor in the office break room

Full disclosure: these two humorous exchanges took place several years ago in the break room of the Department of Agricultural Engineering.

First, four women co-workers chatting over lunch stopped their girltalk when a Middle Eastern graduate student entered to heat up his lunch.

I joked, "Adil, you are brave to come into the kitchen with all girls in here."

Another co-worker: "He's hungry!"

Adil, known for both his sense humor and his limited English proficiency, came right back with, "A hungry man is a brave man."

Of great concern to these agricultural engineers was nonpoint source pollution, or contaminants contained in runoff. (Point source pollution refers more to a outlet pipe from a factory, for instance. A Pakistani engineer who specialized in runoff from dairy feed lots mentioned that his brother was a proctologist.

"You see, we both deal with waste disposal."

A graduate student [now himself a professor]: "Yeah, but he is more into point source."