How to invite people to dinner

I was searching for some important e-mails when I found this beauty I wrote a couple years ago….

Needless to say very few people understood it… So, let me explain a bit about this…

When you’re the new PhD student at Glasgow Uni, your duty is to organice the winter dinner with all the staff and PhD students… So, you need to coordinate everyone, search the place, book it and that kind of malarkey.

But me, being who am I… decided to go a bit further and write the initial invitation email in a “geek way “, which I thought everyone or most likely everyone was going to understand it… This was not the case.

I love science fiction movies, and one of my favourite ones is “Alien” from Ridley Scott, and in this movie one of the characters is a computer… MU-TH-UR 6000, commonly referred to simply as “Mother“, was the computer mainframe aboard the USCSS Nostromo (the space ship). Mother operated many of the ship’s background systems, and auto-piloted the vessel while the crew were in hypersleep. It was also programmed to wake the crew during the voyage should certain situations arise. Take a look at the output interface of Mother from the 1979 movie:

So, my email had the idea to appear a bit similar to Mother from Alien. The results were catastrophic… people thought my email was made by a “bot” or it was spam… People these days right??  The GPS coordinates were actually the ones for the restaurant.

At the end I had to resend a regular email and then people started to reply.