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

a date. If the guy didn't know how to dance, they'd teach him to dance. One
group was teaching the other how to think, while the other guys were
teaching them how to be social.
That was just right for me, because I was not very good socially. I was
so timid that when I had to take the mail out and walk past some seniors
sitting on the steps with some girls, I was petrified: I didn't know how to
walk past them! And it didn't help any when a girl would say, "Oh, he's
cute!"
It was only a little while after that the sophomores brought their
girlfriends and their girlfriends' friends over to teach us to dance. Much
later, one of the guys taught me how to drive his car. They worked very hard
to get us intellectual characters to socialize and be more relaxed, and vice
versa. It was a good balancing out.
I had some difficulty understanding what exactly it meant to be
"social." Soon after these social guys had taught me how to meet girls, I
saw a nice waitress in a restaurant where I was eating by myself one day.
With great effort I finally got up enough nerve to ask her to be my date at
the next fraternity dance, and she said yes.
Back at the fraternity, when we were talking about the dates for the
next dance, I told the guys I didn't need a date this time - I had found
one on my own. I was very proud of myself.
When the upperclassmen found out my date was a waitress, they were
horrified. They told me that was not possible; they would get me a "proper"
date. They made me feel as though I had strayed, that I was amiss. They
decided to take over the situation. They went to the restaurant, found the
waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to
educate their "wayward son," so to speak, but they were wrong, I think. I
was only a freshman then, and I didn't have enough confidence yet to stop
them from breaking my date.
When I became a pledge they had various ways of hazing. One of the
things they did was to take us, blindfolded, far out into the countryside in
the dead of winter and leave us by a frozen lake about a hundred feet apart.
We were in the middle of absolutely nowhere - no houses, no nothing - and
we were supposed to find our way back to the fraternity. We were a little
bit scared, because we were young, and we didn't say much - except for one
guy, whose name was Maurice Meyer: you couldn't stop him from joking around,
making dumb puns, and having this happy-go-lucky attitude of "Ha, ha,
there's nothing to worry about. Isn't this fun!"
We were getting mad at Maurice. He was always walking a little bit
behind and laughing at the whole situation, while the rest of us didn't know
how we were ever going to get out of this.
We came to an intersection not far from the lake - there were still no
houses or anything - and the rest of us were discussing whether we should
go this way or that way, when Maurice caught up to us and said, "Go this
way."
"What the hell do you know, Maurice?" we said, frustrated. "You're
always making these jokes. Why should we go this way?"
"Simple: Look at the telephone lines. Where there's more wires, it's
going toward the central station."
This guy, who looked like he wasn't paying attention to anything, had