Schrödinger's Cat

I am not a scientist.

However, I do watch the Big Bang Theory regularly, my husband is a scientist, my brother is a scientist, my stepdad is a scientist, and heck, some of my best friends are scientists!  

So I am familiar with the story of Schrödinger's cat.  This slightly mad scientist in the photo below is Schrödinger.  

Schrödinger had some wild story that proved some scientific theory about how two opposite things could both simultaneously be true.  (At least, that's my best memory of it, I know that I could google it and give you the actual true story, but you can do that if you really care!)

Regardless, here's my probably very garbled version of the story. . .

Schrödinger proposed that if you put a live cat in a wooden box with some sort of edible poison and sealed up the box so that you couldn't see inside, the cat could be said in theory to be both dead and alive at the exact same time.  And that only when you opened the box would the equation collapse and only one of the truths would continue to be true.  (I got that collapse the equation quote from one of the best friend scientists!  Thanks!)

So, you ask yourself, what does this have to do with anything?

Well, that evening in late April when I held an envelope from HR in my hands that I knew contained the letter about my leave, the first thing I thought about was Schrödinger's cat!  In that very instant, my leave was both granted and denied, and I was very nervous about opening the envelope and collapsing the equation!

After staring at the envelope with shaking hands and wondering whether the cat was dead or alive for what seemed an eternity, I finally managed to open the envelope, and when I read the letter inside, this is how I felt . . .