Fan Club
During one phase of working on the SETI@home project our one giant office in the Space Sciences Laboratory contained me and Jeff, and sometimes Dan, Eric, and Dave. We were pretty much the whole group of people keeping afloat the world's largest distributed computing project (and world's largest and most sensitive search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Often Jeff and I were the only occupants, and my desk was right by the entrance.
Given the popularity of our work we'd get visitors from time to time. They'd just wander into the lab, find our office, and come across me plunking away at my Sun Microsystems desktop. In confusion they would ask, "is this.. SETI@home?" I'd say yes and clearly they were crestfallen by our bland work environment. Where's the security? Where's all the men in black? Where is all the staff running this global scale supercomputing project? Nope, it was just a few average people. Reality is fairly mundane.
Since these guests were all fans who made some effort to find us, I'd give them a quick tour - showing them our closet across the hall buzzing with storage and data servers and giving them a glimpse "behind the scenes." Sometimes I couldn't help but ask where they were from and then throw a curveball about how I was just in their home town playing a gig.
Most were nice people who were merely in the neighborhood and scientifically curious. Some would seem sane at first, and ask good questions, but would eventually devolve into stories about their personal UFO experiences. I'd be incredibly diplomatic about such digressions and would steer the conversation towards something else.
Then there was this one guy who basically snuck up behind me wearing a wig. He had a blank expression when I turned and said, "hello...?" Apparently I didn't get the joke as he was "dressed up as an alien." He removed the wig and apologized for the misunderstanding but then started getting down to business. He whipped out a dollar bill and pointed out all the references in the design to alien visitations. "Ho boy here we go," I thought, and then spaced out as he started talking about Chariots of the Gods and all that crap.
It was a long and awkward ten minutes as he expected me to engage and confirm all his theories, but I kept repeating something like, "this isn't what we do here - we're a scientific project mining actual data." Eventually he said enough. I promised to read up on his suggested literature, and he went on his way.
Jeff, who was present but silent the whole time, commended me on my ability to calmly manage that person. However soon afterward I moved my desk from being right by the front door to being the furthest away.