"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

from the tables on to a tray at the side, and when it gets high enough you carry it into the
kitchen. So you get a new tray, right? You should do it in two steps ­­ take the old tray
away, and put in a new one ­­ but I thought, "I'm going to do it in one step." So I tried to
slide the new tray under, and pull the old tray out at the same time, and it slipped ­­
BANG! All the stuff went on the floor. And then, naturally, the question was, "What
were you doing? How did it fall?" Well, how could I explain that I was trying to invent a
new way to handle trays?
Among the desserts there was some kind of coffee cake that came out very pretty
on a doily, on a little plate. But if you would go in the back you'd see a man called the
pantry man. His problem was to get the stuff ready for desserts. Now this man must have
been a miner, or something ­­ heavy­built, with very stubby, rounded, thick fingers. He'd
take this stack of doilies, which are manufactured by some sort of stamping process, all
stuck together, and he'd take these stubby fingers and try to separate the doilies to put
them on the plates. I always heard him say, "Damn deez doilies!" while he was doing
this, and I remember thinking, "What a contrast ­­ the person sitting at the table gets this
nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is
saying, 'Damn deez doilies!'" So that was the difference between the real world and what
it looked like.
My first day on the job the pantry lady explained that she usually made a ham
sandwich, or something, for the guy who was on the late shift. I said that I liked desserts,
so if there was a dessert left over from supper, I'd like that. The next night I was on the
late shift till 2:00 A.M. with these guys playing poker. I was sitting around with nothing to
do, getting bored, when suddenly I remembered there was a dessert to eat. I went over to
the icebox and opened it up, and there she'd left six desserts! There was a chocolate
pudding, a piece of cake, some peach slices, some rice pudding, some jello ­­ there was
everything! So I sat there and ate the six desserts ­­ it was sensational!
The next day she said to me, "I left a dessert for you. . ."
"It was wonderful," I said, "abolutely wonderful!"
"But I left you six desserts because I didn't know which one you liked the best."
So from that time on she left six desserts. They weren't always different, but there
were always six desserts.
One time when I was desk clerk a girl left a book by the telephone at the desk
while she went to eat dinner, so I looked at. it. It was The Life of Leonardo, and I couldn't
resist: The girl let me borrow it and I read the whole thing.
I slept in a little room in the back of the hotel, and there was some stew about
turning out the lights when you leave your room, which I couldn't ever remember to do.
Inspired by the Leonardo book, I made this gadget which consisted of a system of strings
and weights ­­ Coke bottles full of water ­­ that would operate when I'd open the door,
lighting the pull­chain light inside. You open the door, and things would go, and light the
light; then you close the door behind you, and the light would go out. But my real
accomplishment came later.
I used to cut vegetables in the kitchen. String beans had to be cut into one­inch
pieces. The way you were supposed to do it was: You hold two beans in one hand, the
knife in the other, and you press the knife against the beans and your thumb, almost
cutting yourself. It was a slow process. So I put my mind to it, and I got a pretty good
idea. I sat down at the wooden table outside the kitchen, put a bowl in my lap, and stuck a