ULB on Ice: Prinotherapy and busymania

Biological evolution is renowned to have occurred in a somewhat funny manner in Antarctica. Solitary birds, fatty seals and ugly fishes can testify for that. But Antarctic evolution has recently come up with an even more funny kind of fauna: goggles-and-big-shoe-wearing humans.

Strangely enough, some of those humans on the continent cannot stay away from their keypad and radargrams for more than 10 sec.; they're called radar geeks (or sometimes geophysicists).

Some others just spend their time making and looking after holes in the ice; they're called ice moles (or sometimes drillers).
Some others are on the look-out after cut fingers and defibrillators to test; they're called Health Angels (or optionally medical doctors).
Some others, yet, build stuffs wherever they can, like e.g. a scientific station on a bomb-proofed granite ridge in the middle of a remote ice field; they're called chain saw addicts (or eventually builders).
But those different types of people, as different and peculiar as they are, have something in common: they just can't do anything but doing their stuff. This is their passion, what fills their life, what keeps them busy.
They're busymaniacs.

As a matter a fact, a 'Prinoth' is a bully type of vehicle with caterpillar tracks used in snowy areas for various purposes, like e.g. flattening surfaces, digging holes, pulling containers, or housing crazy scientists. As
you might expect, these machines are very convenient at the station, and the latter would probably not even occupy a single pixel on the map without them.
But, as is the case with many machines (just ask Stanley Kubrick), a Prinoth can rapidly slip out of control from its user, whatever the quality of the manual. This is especially the case when a busymaniac has lost its principal occupation, that is, when there is nothing left to do. Then comes the mess - for there is no other treatment for the guy to get over his discomfort than the so-called 'Prinotherapy'. Driving full power across snow bumps and ice cracks on a Prinoth, in reverse if possible to be able to enjoy the alarm bell, becomes the only known way to date to relief the desperate soul. One of the very few counterparts, however, of the Prinotherapy being the dB level around the station during consultation hours, knowing that busymaniacs, for some reasons currently in study, never practice their medicine alone. If you have ever lived close by a Seven Eleven (USA) or a Delhaize (BEL) store and have experienced the 4:00AM nightly truck delivery, you might catch some glimpses of the intensity of the collective treatment. Anyway, this has the advantage, I have to concede, to provide you with some recollections of Big City life in case you would miss it. So, next time you feel like having a Saturday Night buzz in Antarctica, you now know what to do – just get your colleagues out of their favourite occupation. The choregraphy won’t be a long time coming.