She said we must not confuse an individual with his or her task, which is just what we expected someone in her position to say.  It was a stare-down match, tense:  everybody knew that in the blink of an eye, one of us could blink.  He was told to write “Human beings are not insensate photocopying machines” on the blackboard one hundred times.  I laughed at their threat to articulate my skeleton if I kept giving them the silent treatment—in that pile of bones, they’d never figure out which were mine.  XXX is more exciting than X, so I figured $0.00 was a better deal than $0.