Glad I didn't say it

The setting
Oxford's Radcliffe Science Library, where I am working over the summer to pay for beer and biscuits. We were stacking obsolete science journals in shelving deep beneath the earth's surface. Now, you may not know this, but scientific journals vary widely in
how easy they are to stack. There's the coefficient of friction on the cover, there's the centre of mass*... some are easy to stack, some are not. The Journal of Applied Physics is awful.

What I didn't say:
"Man, I hate the JAPS".

How it might have played out:
Anlin Wang: "Actually, I'm chinese."


*Is it ironic that I describe how to stack scientific journals using terms like "Mass" and 'Coefficient"? Is it ironic that the journals most prone to disastrous landslides are the Annals of Geology?