For lunch today, I bought myself a peanut butter Power Bar, a bottle of orange juice, and a four-pak of AAA batteries. I have no idea why I feel compelled to spell that as "pak," but I do and you will just have to get over it.
The first two items are for my immediate consumption. In fact, they have already been consumed. So really, they WERE for my immediate consumption, and they fulfilled the purpose for which they were purchased admirably. The last item, this four-pak, well. They are food for my graphic calculator. My Sharp EL-9200C, which I believe is currently going for $7.99 on eBay and for which I paid something like $200, has come out of retirement. The last time I used this sucker was the first semester of my freshman year of college, a.k.a. Fall 1995. Its batteries were so old, they had expired in 1998. And now my physics professor wants me to use this thing to figure out things like cosines and tangents, when the only thing that I actually remember about these two concepts is how to spell and pronounce them.
During the first lecture, last Thursday night, my physics professor wanted to walk us through a sample problem. The trouble was, he could not find any chalk. So rather than go somewhere to get some chalk, he talked his way through the problem, and then pointed to the board, illustrating where he would be writing down key parts of the Coulomb's Law equation, had he any chalk. I almost thought I was in the wrong room, and had accidentally stumbled into Physics for Mimes.