Independent Consultant with a Hawaiian Shirt

In the fall of 1991, my involvement with the New Student Orientation program at my alma mater found our group attending a national conference in Boston. We arrived from Los Angeles two days early to take in some of the sights of autumn in New England. We strolled past a certain university campus in Cambridge just to be able to say, “Yeah, I went to Harvard.” And as we crossed the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge, I noticed that there were lines painted at regular intervals. Further investigation revealed these to be Smoot marks. What is a Smoot mark? In the spirit of a last-minute term paper, let me borrow liberally from Wikipedia: The smoot is a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot, a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 lay down repeatedly on the Harvard Bridge (between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts) so that his fraternity brothers could use his height to measure ...