A lady I know was fuming like anything a week or so back. Not usually given to sudden outbursts and not easily swayed by minor mishaps, her reaction told the whole story; she wasn’t a happy woman. Yes strange is the very term that was sending her up the wall.
She works in some posh office where the pay seems to be your age times a hundred. Whoa! Now is that great. Believe me; the most discussed problem wouldn’t be people chopping their ages by ten or thirteen but people over reporting their age by twenty or so.
“How old are you?”
“Fifty-five.”
“What! You, fifty-five.”
“Sir, in fact my fifty-sixth birthday is only three months and a half away.”
“You don’t look more than twenty eight or thirty to me!”
“Sir it isn’t only you who is surprised. Many people mistake me for a young man.”
“When were you born?”
Gotcha! You didn’t think of that, did you? Talk of the blow you never see until it lands.
Sad that you can’t phone mom and ask, “Mom when was I born?” She herself turned sixty only the other week. (In the place I live a long time back there was this pretty lady who was twenty-five when she was twenty-five and still twenty-five when she was fifty-plus! You know why I admire her, she never flinches an eyelid, not even for a second, when year after year ‘the magic number’ twenty-five!)
Anyway this lady was having her mid-morning coffee at a café downstairs when this well-dressed man pulls a chair and sits down. She looks up, she doesn’t know the guy. Why is he sitting at her table when the café is full of empty chairs! He tries the break the ice, sort of.
“Do I know you some place?” Having had more than her share of such outdated ‘entrapments,’ her answer was a strong “No!” He laughs and mumbles, “I must have mistaken you for another person.” Almost as part of the same sentence he continues… “Do you work here?”
“Yes, I do.”
He goes on asking her all the silly questions silly guys ask. And finally he says,
“How old are you?”
Would you believe that! A complete stranger is enquiring about her age! She smiles and asks for the bill. The guy goes on;
“You don’t look more than twenty-five to me!”
Well she is near the exit of her forties. The guy was fishing, but he was using the wrong bait.
Now she says this was the second time someone she doesn’t know asks for her age. The other one was a woman who looked like she was locked in a bloody duel with nature which was trying to give away her age! She has decided thirty was a comfortable number, out goes a decade and a half.
You don’t know he guy. He’s a complete stranger. And you get into nice, harmless small talk. And then he asks you something like “Where do you work?”
Where do I work? What is to this stranger if you are even employed let alone trying to find out where you work! “I work in the office of…” drop in the name of some heavyweight and leave him openmouthed.
“Oh, really! You work in his office?”
“Yes, I do.”
Let him shake in his boots! That’s what those of us who encroach into the private lives of others, while we are complete strangers to them, deserve…shake in our boots!
The Ethiopian herald December 13/2020