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Professor Desmond Achterberg, Professor of Applied Waiting

The Guest Book · No. 7077-PENDING

Professor Desmond Achterberg

Professor of Applied Waiting

  • Founding expert
  • Booked soon
“The line is not moving. You are.”

Desmond Achterberg has spent forty years studying the one thing everyone does and nobody enjoys: waiting. His landmark paper proved that the other line is always faster, and he wrote the sequel while standing in it. He measures hold music in "sighs per minute". He once waited so patiently that the office closed around him and he simply stayed for the next day.

Credentials
Tenured chair, Department of Lines, Lakeshore Polytechnic; has waited in every line at the region's largest licensing office, twice
Known for
Proving the other line is always faster, then standing in it.
Weird fact
Owns forty-one "now serving" number tickets. None were ever called.
Specialties
  • waiting in line
  • hold music
  • waiting rooms
  • queues and patience
Joins from
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Appearances
0 · first booking coming up

Their interviews

Professor Desmond Achterberg is on the booking sheet. Their first interview airs on BBN soon.

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    Coach Darnell "The Thermostat" Pruitt

    Household Temperature Mediator

    • Founding expert
    • Booked soon

    Darnell Pruitt coached youth football for twenty years before finding his true calling: standing between a family and a thermostat. He has settled more than nine hundred temperature disputes, most of them between people who share a bed. He brokered the historic Two-Blanket Accord and still gets holiday cards about it. He believes every argument can be solved with a cardigan and a timeout.

    “Sixty-eight degrees. Nobody is happy. That's fair.”
    Episodes
    0
    Debut
    Not yet
    From
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    Beatrix Okonkwo-Lund folded a fitted sheet on live television, and the footage has been studied ever since. She has a theory that every household owns exactly one pillowcase that fits nothing. Her team measured how long people lie awake thinking about something they said in a meeting years ago, and the answer was "too long". She sleeps diagonally, as a matter of professional ethics.

    “A fitted sheet cannot be folded. It can only be negotiated with.”
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    Debut
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    From
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    “Partly cloudy, with a chance of awkward.”
    Episodes
    0
    Debut
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    From
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    Dr. Lucia Ferraventi

    Professor of Group Chat Studies

    • Founding expert
    • Booked soon

    Lucia Ferraventi has read more unread messages than anyone alive, which she admits is a contradiction. She decoded the national meaning of the single thumbs-up, and it was not good news. Her lab tracks the exact moment a group chat goes quiet after someone asks who is bringing dessert. She is muted in eleven group chats, including the one she started.

    “Nobody has read the chat. Everyone has seen the chat.”
    Episodes
    0
    Debut
    Not yet
    From
    Providence, Rhode Island

Parody and entertainment: Professor Desmond Achterberg is a fictional character. The institute, the studies and the numbers are invented too.