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

After the war the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get the guys for
the occupation forces in Germany. Up until then the army deferred people for some
reason other than physical first (I was deferred because I was working on the bomb), but
now they reversed that and gave everybody a physical first.
That summer I was working for Hans Bethe at General Electric in Schenectady,
New York, and I remember that I had to go some distance ­­ I think it was to Albany ­­ to
take the physical.
I get to the draft place, and I'm handed a lot of forms to fill out, and then I start
going around to all these different booths. They check your vision at one, your hearing at
another, they take your blood sample at another, and so forth.
Anyway, finally you come to booth number thirteen: psychiatrist. There you wait,
sitting on one of the benches, and while I'm waiting I can see what is happening. There
are three desks, with a psychiatrist behind each one, and the "culprit" sits across from the
psychiatrist in his BVDs and answers various questions.
At that time there were a lot of movies about psychiatrists. For example, there was
Spellbound, in which a woman who used to be a great piano player has her hands stuck in
some awkward position and she can't move them, and her family calls in a psychiatrist to
try to help her, and the psychiatrist goes upstairs into a room with her, and you see the
door close behind them, and downstairs the family is discussing what's going to happen,
and then she comes out of the room, hands still stuck in the horrible position, walks
dramatically down the stairs over to the piano and sits down, lifts her hands over the
keyboard, and suddenly ­­ dum diddle dum diddle dum, dum, dum ­­ she can play again.
Well, I can't stand this kind of baloney, and I had decided that psychiatrists are fakers,
and I'll have nothing to do with them. So that was the mood I was in when it was my turn
to talk to the psychiatrist.
I sit down at the desk, and the psychiatrist starts looking through my papers.
"Hello, Dick!" he says in a cheerful voice. "Where do you work?"
I'm thinking, "Who does he think he is, calling me by my first name?" and I say
coldly, "Schenectady."
"Who do you work for, Dick?" says the psychiatrist, smiling again.
"General Electric."
"Do you like your work, Dick?" he says, with that same big smile on his face.
"So­so." I just wasn't going to have anything to do with him.
Three nice questions, and then the fourth one is completely different. "Do you
think people talk about you?" he asks, in a low, serious tone.
I light up and say, "Sure! When I go home, my mother often tells me how she was
telling her friends about me." He isn't listening to the explanation; instead, he's writing
something down on my paper.
Then again, in a low, serious tone, he says, "Do you think people stare at you?"
I'm all ready to say no, when he says, ''For instance, do you think any of the boys
waiting on the benches are staring at you now?"
While I had been waiting to talk to the psychiatrist, I had noticed there were about
twelve guys on the benches waiting for the three psychiatrists, and they've got nothing
else to look at, so I divide twelve by three ­­ that makes four each ­­ but I'm conservative,
so I say, "Yeah, maybe two of them are looking at us."
He says, "Well just turn around and look" ­­ and he's not even bothering to look