Friday, February 17, 2012

Getting To Know You

One time the company I used to work for had an all-employee meeting that included a catered sit-down luncheon.  To accommodate several hundred people, it was held in a vast conference room with dozens of large round tables set for ten people.  Seating was assigned, and care had been taken to place together people from different departments who might not know each other well or at all.  All of us at my table seemed to be complete strangers, and what conversation there was at first was stilted and awkward.  Some of the tension was relieved when a swarm of professional waitpersons swept into the room and began serving the first course.

During the interval between the time that most people had finished their salad and the next course was served, a young woman from the P. R. department started flitting around the room stopping here and there at one table or another to take photographs.  Our table was given a miss, for which I was grateful, and I turned to the woman next to me, whom I had never even heard of before, and said, "I don't think it's nice to ask people to smile for the camera right after they've eaten spinach salad."

She laughed, smiling broadly enough for me to see that there was a rather large piece of spinach stuck right between her two front teeth.

And no, I didn't tell her.

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