My Office Neighbor Charles Stevens

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

This story was originally published on The Intellectual on Apr 20, 2018.

One

In the summer of 2015, Professor Charles Stevens moved into an office next to mine, and we became neighbors at work.

Professor Charles Stevens was 83 years old. Everyone, including me, always called him Chuck.

Chuck liked to wear dark green or navy blue pullovers over plaid shirts, a pair of worn jeans, and black leather shoes. His back was a little hunched. As a result, when he walked, his head was a little forward, as if his brain would like to be ahead of the rest of his body.

At the time when he moved into the office next door, I was going through a rather difficult period of my PhD thesis research. Not too long ago, I had embarked on a new project with a series of new experiments. The amount of data that I collected from these experiments was overwhelmingly large, and I needed help with analyzing them.

When Chuck came to my office for the first time to say hi and asked me what I was doing, I told him about my struggles with data.

“Do you know R? I am using it these days and I think it can solve your problem.” He said. R was a command-line application for data analysis.