Unfiltered Story #314590

I was working in the sales tax office of the Wisconsin Dept. of Revenue in Milwaukee, and a guy called wanting to get a temporary seller’s permit for selling books at a convention. I asked what kind, and he explained that it was the Esperanto League of North America. I exclaimed “Bona!” and we carried on the entire rest of the conversation in Esperanto. When I hung up, everybody else in the room was staring at me, as if they’d never heard an entire government process conducted in Esperanto before. (Hey, we’d all seen Mansoor do this in Urdu AND Arabic, so why not Mike in Esperanto?)