This morning, while working on the machine, I found myself trying to match the pace of one of my colleagues, not flooding her with too many requests for her to process and thus plugging up our work processes. But her rate of motion had slowed to something that could only be described as in a state of eternal regression, and to keep in sync required an act of delicate restraint, the kind normally reserved for meditation or endangered wildlife photography.
In this mode of slowed operation, looking for a patch of entertainment, I had a brief impulse to say something—something harmless and offhanded—to a different colleague quietly engaged in some task nearby. She has been ill recently, and she’s still working through the fatigue of that. So I thought I’d keep things light with whatever nonsense I could grab at hand. Seeing an uninteresting co-worker arriving in the parking lot I seized my opportunity: as a kind of performative announcement, I declared, in a tone of theatrical importance, that “Donald has arrived in the parking lot.”
Let me clarify: Donald arriving in the parking lot is not a major event.
Donald arriving in the parking lot does not signal a turning point in the workday. It does not coincide with a dramatic library policy alteration or portend a burst of delicious gossip. It is, in all respects, entirely ordinary. Indeed, it might be described, taking in the person and his qualities, as spectacularly uninteresting.
But I said it like it wasn’t. And this confused my colleague. She looked at me, genuinely curious. There was a pause—one of those brief silences where someone is trying to figure out what they missed. Finally, she asked with real interest, “Oh, what’s going on with Donald?”
I now had a choice. I could try somehow to lean into the absolute slightness of my joke, knowing that the spark of humor in it was so small a mere glance at it could be enough to snuff it out completely, or I could find a quick way to bail.
Clearly the only way forward was the shortest explanation possible.
“Oh,” I said, “It’s just me being me.”
She nodded knowingly, with sudden understanding.
Among the people I work with, that’s all the explanation required.
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