(I’m working part time as a teacher in a nursery school, where the kids are all four or five years old. Today we’re getting the kids to draw around their feet and colour them in so that the parents can hang them on a wall for six months and then shove them in a cupboard.)
Me: “Okay, everyone, can you all take off one shoe and one sock?”
(Five minutes later:)
Me: “Okay ,everyone, can you all take off one shoe and one sock on the same foot?”
(I need some of the stuff you rub on cast-iron fireplaces to blacken them, which is called fireplace black. I can’t find it on the shelves, so I go to ask the chap working in the section where it ought to be, who happens to have extremely dark skin.)
Me: “Hi there, do you have any fireplace black?”
(The worker says nothing, just stares me right in the eye. There is a long, uncomfortable silence while he makes prolonged eye contact. Finally…)
Worker: *continuing to glare* “The fireplaces are over there, whitey.”
(I was just starting on stumbling out an incredibly embarrassed explanation and apology when he fell about laughing, and to my great relief he turned out to have been winding me up.)
(Australia’s frequent changing of Prime Ministers has become a running joke both there and in New Zealand, and they’ve just got a new one again. I’m getting ready for bed when I knock a stuffed koala off a shelf.)
Me: “Meh, I’ll just replace it. Isn’t that what the Australians do, just replace things?”
Girlfriend: “I’m going to get this for a whole month, aren’t I?”
Me: “Month? By the time that’s over, they will have gotten a new one again.”
(The latest management fad is a daily briefing in which we have to state yesterday’s achievements and objectives for today, with a three-minutes time limit, all while standing in a circle holding hands. The implementer of the fad alternates between interrupting people for not giving their statements correctly and reprimanding them for running out of time. My turn comes, but a colleague cuts me off:)
Colleague: “[My Name], get a ladder and get someone to hang that map…”
Me: “Oh, while they have the ladder out, they could also change the burnt-out light bulb in the corridor!”
Fad Implementer: *holding up a finger like I was a little kid* “No, no, no, [My Name], this is not a topic for the morning briefing!”
Me: *speechless*
(I just hope the fad dies out before I punch him in the throat.)
(It has been a very long day at my IT-based company. An important server went down this morning in a particularly messy way. We’ve been on a conference call with both business and technical people for over four hours at this point, first getting the server restarted, then cleaning up all the messes it made and downstream problems that were indirectly caused by the messes. We’ve finally gotten to the end of it all; we’ve solved the last problem and gotten everything back on track.)
Coworker #1: “Okay, so is that it? Are there any other problems?”
(As soon as the words are out of her mouth, all the lights in the building go out; it’s a power outage.)
Coworker #2: “WELL, THAT MIGHT BE ONE!”
