The Enigma Project

It's somewhere in the high forties outside. I know this, even though my little desktop weather icon says that it's 9 C.

Know how I know?

BECAUSE I CRACKED THE CODE!!

Oh yeah - I'm pretty much like one of those cryptography experts in the wars who sat there poring over intercepted enemy messages, sweating and chain-smoking into the wee hours of the night, and suddenly saw the unintelligible letters morph in their mind's eye into clear directives.

(Well, not so much the smoking part.)

Remember how I said I finally put up a little Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion chart at my desk so I could surreptitiously figure out what the locals meant when they were obsessing about the latest highs and/or lows?

This past week, as I was working, that 90% of my brain that they say we never use was unconsciously processing that little chart. Suddenly it saw a pattern - and it tugged at my consciousness:

Pssst. Hey. Check it out. If you subtract 30 from the F temperature and divide by two, you get pretty close to the C temperature...

Gasping, I looked at row after row on the chart to prove the theory - it works! It's not exact, but it's close enough.

So now, whenever someone mentions an F temperature, instead of a sidelong glance at my chart, they see my eyes lose focus as I mentally check out of the conversation for some quick mental math and then just as quickly I can come back and nod and say, "oh yeah, wow, that's going to be so warm, can't wait!"