Office Conversations
Apr. 10th, 2014 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricPicture the scene. There I was, alone in my office, with the afternoon sun finally reaching my chair and delighting me with its warms. I had the door open, but my office is in a cul-de-sac, so little of the usual comings-and-goings in the department actually filters through to my attention unless i'm distracted. Now, I had been very distracted for most of today, but just then, at 15.31 pm, I was absorbed in commenting on a students' essay proposal (a task made thoroughly fascinating by the fact that it wasn't the piece of thesis writing I had intended to be doing today).
Into this placid scene of academic seclusion arrives colleague H, appearing on my threshold with sudden exuberance.
'AMY!' she says, startling me out of my teacherly reverie. 'Are you interested in breastfeeding?'
Reader, I confess myself utterly flummoxed. Suddenly faced with the abstract notion of breastfeeding, I was utterly unable to provide it with any sensible context. Discarding the patently bizarre ('.. right now', '... during your professional career' or possibly '... as a means of earning spare income') I was left with the odd, but plausible: vis, this must be a singularly misplaced attempt to find a home for the copy of Your Baby and Child that had taken up residence on the departmental take-a-book shelf.
'NO!' exclaim I, utterly wrongfooted by this deviation from usual Swiss reserve and indeed workplace behaviour -
Just as colleague H finishes her sentence: '... in the middle ages?'
Rapid recalibration. 'Oh. No, I'm not, but Officemate is.'
'Does she know there's a lecture at 4pm today?'
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was that.
Into this placid scene of academic seclusion arrives colleague H, appearing on my threshold with sudden exuberance.
'AMY!' she says, startling me out of my teacherly reverie. 'Are you interested in breastfeeding?'
Reader, I confess myself utterly flummoxed. Suddenly faced with the abstract notion of breastfeeding, I was utterly unable to provide it with any sensible context. Discarding the patently bizarre ('.. right now', '... during your professional career' or possibly '... as a means of earning spare income') I was left with the odd, but plausible: vis, this must be a singularly misplaced attempt to find a home for the copy of Your Baby and Child that had taken up residence on the departmental take-a-book shelf.
'NO!' exclaim I, utterly wrongfooted by this deviation from usual Swiss reserve and indeed workplace behaviour -
Just as colleague H finishes her sentence: '... in the middle ages?'
Rapid recalibration. 'Oh. No, I'm not, but Officemate is.'
'Does she know there's a lecture at 4pm today?'
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was that.