"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

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 -
heavy-built, 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 pull-chain 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 one-inch 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