For example, my company has a client that makes rubber floor mats, primarily for the dairy industry, out of used tires. I was lucky that the contact with whom I usually speak was patient because that inspired many questions. Where do they get the tires? What inspired this idea? How is it done? In addition to the questions I asked him, I investigated the subject. I am still curious on this topic. If I were in school, I would have written a research paper. I know, I am a nerd. I was thinking that if I were a reporter, I would probably be able to obtain more information. Particularly on what a certain major supermarket chain does with my tires that they make me pay to recycle. In the future, this topic alone may become a post because I think it is neat that this environmentally unfriendly eyesore:
can become this ecologically savvy and humane product:
(This picture is borrowed.)This same interest, one that meant that throughout the day my thoughts were going back to the same question, happened just last week. A prospective customer called wanting to know some basic but random information. He wanted to know if we could measure the velocity of the water leaving out machine at a specific distance from the point of exit. Sounds simple enough, right? In reality, this question is typically unnecessary for 99.999% of the people who talk to us.
But then there's the random person every several years who asks. At first I thought maybe he was looking for something akin to a speedometer, but for water. I asked my tech service. This is not a product we offer. As it turns out, there are formulas that can help to derive this information (although an apparatus of some sort would be easier, if you ask me. Program IT to do the work, I say). Then... it sounds like physics. And physics, ladies and gentlemen, was not my forte in school. Not in high school. Not in college. But I was captivated. I looked up even more formulas to resolve unknowns. I found more unknowns. I asked the gentleman questions about his application (which was very different from any system we offer or any application we can do). He wanted to create a water curtain, essentially, to act as a sound barrier. I found the application just as intriguing as the math involved. Although my interest diminished after a couple of hard work days and the knowledge that I will probably never come to a suitable answer, just writing about it gets me all fired up again.
It is a thirst for knowledge. A desire to comprehend. It's the thing that makes me the red-blooded nerdy girl that I am. It's true that I am not a brilliant mad scientist, but that's probably a good thing. The truth remains that there come days when a good question comes to the surface... and somewhere in the ho-hum doldrums of same day, same stuff land, I have a spark that elevates me to look at things from a new perspective.
Am I the only one who really gets that interested in some random topic?
