Here's something a bit different. A not-very-well-focused-or-framed scan of a calculator? Well, of course, a story goes with it, but it's basically told by what I punched in on the calculator before I scanned it today. Yes, I won it. Not recently, but it's approximately the 27th anniversary of when I won it, in early fall of 1987. The occasion was an engineering job fair on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. When I went in, I filled out a slip of paper to register for the door prize. I'd just moved to Austin with my wife of that time, now ex-wife, and was working as a physics lab instructor and was enrolled in physics graduate school. For me the lab teaching was just a job offer that had enabled me to move to Austin from Little Rock. I didn't really want to pursue the usual graduate student fast track, so I was looking for another job, and thus went to the College of Engineering job fair.
When I got home and my wife told me I'd had a call saying I won a calculator, I wasn't jumping up and down. Big deal, a calculator! Things changed when I found out it was the HP top-of-the-line graphing calculator. Winning it was one of the few good things that happened to me at that time (I wound up dropping my graduate physics classes, since I was about to flunk.) The other good thing about the calculator was more recent, namely I got it working again. I hadn't used it for Lord knows how long, and whenever I last tried putting new batteries in it, it didn't work. Then I tried again this year and it worked. I use it as a normal calculator and also for Chapter 3 (matrix calculation) problems in Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences, an excellent textbook by Mary L. Boas.
Back in '87 the calculator was worth several hundred dollars, which is also about the retail price of the 43" flat-panel TV I won in a drawing last year at this time at the Arkansas Recycling Coalition conference in Eureka Springs. I was actually more excited about getting the old calculator to work than about winning the TV. I let a friend borrow the TV to use in his bedroom, since I don't watch much TV anyway, and the one I've got already (a hand-me-down 27" non-digital with an external converter box) is enough for me.
