Kindred spirits
o o o o o
There was that one time I was stopped behind a pick-up truck at a red light. Nothing about it seemed particularly notable, just an ordinary pick-up truck. Only when the light turned green and it pulled away did I notice that it had a bumper sticker with the words LINGUA LATINA SEMPER SERVABITUR (meaning roughly "The Latin language will live forever"). Hey, "my kind of people", at least to that extent. And driving a pick-up truck.
o o o o o
Many years ago -- it may have been my first office job -- one of the decorations I had up in my cubicle was something I had put together myself, a photograph of a gorilla with the first eight lines of this poem. One morning when I arrived at work, I found a note on my desk which turned out to be from the janitor. He said he liked the decoration and asked if I could make another copy for him. So that evening I ran off another copy, put it in an envelope, and left it on the desk the next day marked "janitor". It didn't occur to me to put in a note encouraging further communication, though the guy must have had a pretty strong interest to have made such an advance in the first place.
(A few days later I mentioned to the boss that the janitor had asked me for a copy of the picture, just because I thought it was interesting. Her immediate response was to ask if I wanted to make a complaint. This shocked me, since it had not even occurred to me that it was anything to complain about. Maybe she thought it was presumptuous for a lowly janitor to address a lordly clerical accountant.)
o o o o o
In one back window of my car I have a small strip of paper taped to be visible from the outside, which has a kind of "pun" in Japanese on it. One day, as I was returning to my car in the post office parking lot, a Japanese guy stopped me and pointed to this and said, "That's pretty funny." We talked about the language for a couple of minutes and he gave me his business card and asked me to get in touch. I never did, though -- the card showed he worked for some Christian evangelical group, and that put me off a bit. Maybe I should have. I could easily have just dropped out of touch if he started pushing religion on me.
o o o o o
At the one-week temp job I had last November, a regular employee asked me about a book I was reading during lunch break. It turned out he was from Iran, a member of the Baha'i religious minority (which is viciously persecuted by the regime there), and he had most of the same kinds of interests as I do. Every time he ran into me in the office he engaged me in long discussions about history or religion or whatever, to the extent that I'm surprised the manager didn't complain about loss of work time. On my last day he asked me for contact info so he could keep in touch, so I gave him my e-mail address. A couple of days later I got a message from him asking if he could meet up with me, so I replied with some suggestions about times and places.
But I never heard back from him. I even sent a copy of the message to his work e-mail, in case the original had gone to spam or something, but he didn't reply. Given his original enthusiasm, this seemed very surprising. I wonder if some family member or clergyman told him not to stay in contact with me because I would undermine his faith -- my atheism would have been very evident from our conversations in the office. But who knows.
o o o o o
Ah, well, there's always the blog.
posted by Infidel753 at 2:03 AM
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