Winklestein

The origin of my alter ego, Dr. Winklestein...

I really didn't like school when I was growing up. It definitely wasn't fun, I got picked-on a lot, and I simply couldn't see the point. Why did I have to learn all that seemingly useless stuff anyway? Oh, I had questions all right. Lots and lots of questions about many things; but we never covered any of those things in school; and the teachers never could answer any of my questions.

In fact, many of the teachers didn't appreciate my questions. I wanted to know: Why do people get old? Why does water get bigger when it freezes when almost everything else gets smaller? I had a lot of technical questions too that I won't bore you with. I didn't even find answers to these questions when I got to college! Why didn't professors know these things? There may have been people who knew the answers to my questions; but in two years I never ran into a single one.

It wasn't until my junior year that I had a professor who could answer my questions. After that I encountered several, but Dr. William Tessin was the first. His homework and test problems always involved some fictitious person with a funny name who drove to California and back on a single tank of gas or lit up an entire city with a single lump of coal. His problems and examples were about water heaters, radiators, solar panels, and perpetual motion machines. He related scientific principles to everyday life and turned my academic direction around. He changed the course of my life.

When I began teaching I wanted to have my own crazy guy who invented things and made outrageous claims to feature in homework and test problems; so Dr. Winklestein was born. I created a diploma for him and awarded him a special degree: Violatum Secund Lawdum [as no one else has ever violated the Second Law of Thermodynamics]. He only appeared in print for several years until. . .

Along came my brother-in-law, Kim Leonard, who could not only draw, but create sculptures; so Dr. Winklestein leapt from the printed page! Here he is in 3D--complete with ping pong ball eyes and a real No.2 pencil in his monogrammed lab coat pocket! I've had this paper machete figure on my desk since 1977!

For years I've been telling impatient people on the phone that, "oh, yes, Dr. Winklestein is on that project" or that, "I went home; but he was here all night on the report" or that, "he hasn't eaten or slept in days!" If they call back to check up on the status of their project, I just tell them, "he's still on top of it!" He even had his own facebook page--complete with a dog named Murphy!

He's become a legend everywhere I've worked. Once we had a particularly irritating client who would call every day for a progress report. One day when he called I plopped Wink down on a stack of papers and said, "we've just put our best man, Dr. Winklestein, on this project. In fact he's on it right now and he won't leave the office until it's done!" The guy was so impressed he quit calling... problem solved!