Remember this one? My wife and I once saw a spitting image of the bee girl. We were parked in our car eating ice cream cones at Garsides in Saco. Why the need to go to Saco for an ice cream escapes me, but that's where we were. Anyway, I pointed out the bee girl, and God, did we laugh. Pee your pants, can't catch your breath, ice cream melting over your fingers kind of laughing. Nothing needed to be said, no words needed, it was just there.
Which gets me thinking, how many conversations do we have in a day?...I don't mean emails, or facebook posts, or even phone calls, I'm talking honest to goodness conversations. Two or more people engaged in direct face to face communication....and how many of these do we actually remember (we meaning me). If you recall, I don't have the greatest memory. Here's a reminder...
(This isn't an actual photo of the event, my neighbor doesn't have a beard).
Just like the knight in shining armor, or the cowboy dressed in white, or Leonardo Dicaprio in Titanic..He had come to my rescue. He shuts the machine off, we have a nice conversation, and I'm able to pull both cars out into the street and then drive away. Leaving him behind to finish off the driveway. I'm off to a good start in the conversation department.
Then there was the interesting conversation that I was involved in when I first got to work. It involved the highway just outside of Albany New York, an illegal u turn, a mystery appearance by a cop, the cop playing chicken with the guy that did the u turn, then the cop hitting his blue lights and going after someone else. It was a great story when I first heard it at 8:00 AM. It was a little less interesting when I heard it retold at 8:30. I was bored with it when I heard it again at 9:30. I started to visually re enact it for others when it was told for the fourth time at 11:00. Whenever he would talk about his role in the story I started to act like a chimpanzee and when he told the parts about the cop I would act out the samurai delicatessen scene from the old Saturday Night Lives. When I heard it again at lunch , me and three others (who had also heard the story repeatedly) pulled him out of the cafeteria by his tightie whities, threw him out of a third story window, went down and collected his body, and stuffed it in the trunk of a stolen car...which we then drove off the Casco Bay Bridge. Do you think he got the point?
I hope he had good insurance.
Then the floodgates opened ....nine conversations about things I was so done with at work...eight about the weather...seven about things I wasn't paying attention to...six about a sitcom that I have never seen, and am not even sure if it truly exists...five about children of coworkers (two of which I didn't even know had kids...and one that I'm not even sure that I knew the person that I was talking to)...four more about the weather...three about pets (one dog, one fish, and one chicken, yes, chicken)..two about sick family members..and one about Ted Nugent. I could feel my blood pressure starting to climb.
You know what? At that point I was ready to give in. Chalk one up in the "them" column in the "us vs. them" game. Was it just me? So you know what I did? I went and visited my Mother.
...and I talked to my Mom about work, and the weather (twice), and about not paying attention, and sitcoms I had never seen, other peoples kids, pets, sick family members, and yes, even Ted Nugent. How did this make me feel? You already know the answer...great.
That made me realize how much I love my Mom.
...and I work with some CRAZY mofo's.
Enjoy January.
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