"He's British."

A colleague, Andrew, and I have a written a letter to the editor of Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis (ACHA is the leading journal in our area of mathematics, which is called the same thing) detailing a very common misconception in our field that seems to be popping up in, unfortunately, ever single paper on a particular topic. Journals such as this have an editorial staff that consists almost completely of volunteers who are primarily mathematicians from academics who serve on the editorial staff as a “service” to the mathematics community. When you write a paper and submit it to a journal, it is first read by one of these editors, and then sent out to other volunteer referees. They read it, check the math, and decide if it is worthy of publishing in the journal. This takes a while, roughly a year from start to finish. Anyway, we got our letter back with a friendly review asking us to address a few points.

Andrew is a PhD student and therefore shares an office. I am a visitor and therefore share an office. We decided one day to meet about revising the paper with the referee comments in mind. In the center of The King’s Buildings (the awesome name of the campus on which The School of Mathematics resides) is essentially a student union known as KB House. The best part of this place is that they have 9 beers on tap. The bar is also a coffee shop and serves some food. The worst part of this place is the food.

So we had a table and I went and ordered a Panini. The chap taking my order seemed very put off by the fact that I was ordering food. It was not really lunch time so I figured this was the problem. When my Panini was ready, he didn’t say anything at all, just set it down on the counter and took my “your order is ready” beeper. Hmmmm. Andrew and I talked for about an hour, working out the details of when a certain condition could be useful. When leaving, Andrew and I put our dirty plates and such on the counter and Andrew gave the usual, “Cheers!” to the guy behind the bar. The reaction was a head nod, possibly with a mumbled return cheers, but certainly nothing like thanks for brining your dishes up and spending your money in our place.

As we walked out, I said to Andrew, “Gosh, that guy sure was angry. He was angry that I ordered a Panini, angry that he had to make it and serve it to me, and he seemed angry even that we put our plates on the counter.” Andrew just started laughing. Then Andrew says, “He’s not angry, Jeff; he’s British.”