Thursday, October 18, 2007

Correction + My own personal Jim



I made a mistake in my previous post: It wasn't Thanksgiving last year that was bizarro, it was Christmas. I get my winter family holidays all confused sometimes.





Also, since I was sick on Tuesday, today was my first day working with the new guy at work. It took 16 months, but it's finally happened: I have my own personal Jim Halpert. Swoon! The other two people who work in our end of the office were stuck in a meeting for nearly four hours this morning, so I had him all to myself. We talked about our favorite places to get a beer, I showed him the powerpoint presentation I was working on (he was a really good sport about it, which means he has no clue how much of his immediate work future will involve the horrible powerpoint), and he told me about living in France without a cell phone.






"It was fantastic," he said, "not having a cell phone. I had already been there two months when I went to the movie theatre, and just as the movie was starting I had a moment of panic where I thought, 'Where's my phone? I have to turn it off!' And then I remembered I didn't have a phone."





We were both sitting rather close together in front of my computer at this point. He smelled fantastic, and I felt myself drifting dangerously afar from professionalism. I very nearly murmured, "Tell me more about the movie theatres of France" in a seductive whisper, but I managed to regain my composure just in time. Instead, I jumped up from my seat and blurted, "Have they shown you where the copy machine is yet!?" He said no, so in order to save face for my poorly transitioned question, I gave him a tour of the entire office.





Later, at lunch, he proved even more endearing. A coworker was explaining how in the morning's meeting one person gave grades to various soundbites in a video script they were reviewing: One phrase might be an A+ while another was only a B. Feeling saucy and extremely nerdy, I said, "Did the grades follow a normal distribution?" The joke flew completely over the head of the coworker, but he laughed immediately. (Ok, so it sounds kind of lame in the retelling, but it totally worked in the moment. Really.)





And all I can think about is a certain mmmarilyn who warned me, way back in March, to be careful not to find the man of my dreams in the weeks before going off to meet my destiny...
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1 comment:

marilyn c. cole said...

a "tour" of the entire "office," eh?