There's a Brazilian in my dungeon

There is a new PhD student, an oceanographer, sharing my office, which (for reasons apparent to anyone who has visited it) I fondly term The Dungeon. As those who love a sterotype know (and God knows, living by stereotypes is a lot easier than actually thinking), Brazilians are extroverted, sensual, fun-loving people, which makes them great drinking partners but lousy office mates.

The phone is in almost constant use, and my intellectual processes are now disturbed by an insistent foreign yammering. I don't speak any Portuguese, but I can only surmise that she's not talking about work (unless ocean dynamics are a lot more exciting than I realise).

Jabbering, always jabbering. It's like being a schizophrenic, except that the voices in my head are actual voices, and instead of urging me to rape and kill women they're urging me to tell her to go and derive the UNESCO equation of state (the oceanographic equivalent of 'go wash your head in a bucket of pig's blood, bitch').

A PhD student's office is not the place for fun. It is the place where we execute our commitment to the intellectual meat grinder that is American academia.