TheBanyanTree: The Access Grid Banana

[Mike Pingleton]

I used to run a department here at this major midwestern university but
then I got a promotion of sorts.  Now I'm a project manager and I spend
most of my time dealing with other project managers at various seats of
learning across the United States.  We've got this really big computational
project spanning five institutions and it's a never ending headache and
most days I wish I was still running my little department.

Every Thursday we meet, us project managers, via video-teleconferencing.
Every site has a room with video cameras and microphones and some fancy
tech that allows us to hook it all together over an ultra-high-speed
network.  These video-teleconference rooms are called Access Grid Nodes.
Each site sends two or three camera images to all the other sites, so the
projection wall in our node room is filled with little rectangles full of
people from miles away.  And we're on a wall in their room too.

The meeting is at noon my time, so some people are eating lunch while we
meet.  It's only ten AM out on the west coast, so those folks usually
aren't eating, the same with the Pittsburgh node.  But there's a guy eating
wok-food out of a styrofoam to-go box, and another shoveling in something
from a plastic container. Looks like leftovers.

I don't eat during these video-teleconferences because it feels weird.  You
can watch people eat and they don't know it.  If we were all in the same
room, it would be terribly bad manners to stare at someone while they are
wolfing down a bacon cheeseburger.  Here in the Access Grid Node, nobody
can tell you are watching them eat.

I watch people eat during the meeting.  I can't help it.  I don't have some
weird fetish, I simply can't get over the fact that a woman thousands of
miles away from me in San Diego is peeling a banana.  In real time.  Right
now.  How does she eat bananas?  Will she take a bite and hold the rest, or
put it down on the table? (Down it goes as she reaches for her laptop).
The Access Grid Banana is a concept I just can't get used to.  It's like
having your neighbors peering through your dining room window at
suppertime, and you know they are there.  And it's supposed to be okay with
all parties involved.

Perhaps this is a perfectly acceptable and terribly mundane social
activity, and I'm making too much of a little thing.  I should just ignore
the people who are eating and pay attention to the project management task
at hand.  It won't be easy - I'm still wondering what that Chicago guy was
eating from an aluminum cake pan.  It didn't look like cake.