Spell Check

Lalage just yelled from her office, “I think my spell checker is broken!”

I asked her what she was trying to spell. She said, “Joyous! J-O-Y-O-U-S. Holidays. H-O-L-I-D-A-Y-S.”

“That’s right,” I said. “What do you think you misspelled?

“Oh, nothing. I guess I just haven’t been making many mistakes lately. It hasn’t corrected me in a long time, so I thought it was broken.”

We walk.

I was just sitting here at my desk yesterday when Lalage came by and dropped a deposit slip and a check in front of me.

“I’m going to drive to Wachovia and deposit this,” she said, holding up another deposit slip. “When I get back, can you walk to Fifth Third and deposit that one?”

Nonplussed, I said, “You don’t just want to do both as long as you’re out?”

“No,” she said, looking confused. “We don’t drive to Fifth Third. We can walk to it.”

I shook my head as she hurried out the door. I know we can walk to Fifth Third. But, you know, we can also drive to it. When she got back, she said something about not knowing whether or not Fifth Third even has drive up banking. I didn’t say anything, but I’m fairly sure that even if they don’t, they probably have a parking lot where you can put your car when you go inside.

Sometimes I can’t figure out if she’s lazy or if this is really how she thinks.

Language Barrier

Now, that's what I call deshuffled.

Lalage seems to have learned the word “disheveled” over the weekend. She’s said it at least three times today. Unfortunately, she seems to have learned it wrong. She keeps saying “deshuffled.” She does this sort of thing a lot.

I may have mentioned before that English is not Lalage’s native language. Though she’s lived in the United States for over half a century, she still hasn’t grasped some of the finer points of the language, such as the word “the.” Where Lalage comes from, they don’t use definite or indefinite articles like we do, so she’s always saying things like, “Don’t they know I have deadline?” or, “I can’t pay this dumb bitch if client doesn’t send me check.”  Sometimes she remembers halfway through her sentence, as in, “I made cage for the chickens.” I don’t feel the need to teach her “a” and “the.” I figure if she can’t be bothered to use them after fifty years, I’m not going to be able to convince her.

She also pronounces “bad” the same as “bed.” I needed clarification on that one. When I said, “Oh, you just pronounced it differently,” she started making fun of our short “a” sound, baaing like a sheep while she said, “baaaad, baaaad,” over and over. It was a little disconcerting.

Betty

Betty was my predecessor. Apparently, she was so bad at her job that Lalage has been permanently traumatized. Betty hasn’t worked here for over three years, but I still hear about her on an almost daily basis.

Betty was stupid. While I fully support making fun of stupidity, I’m a little tired of talking about Betty. At this point, Lalage has told me the same stories countless times. There are only so many times I can laugh about a woman whose filing system seemed to indicate she thought F came before E.

Betty was also a manipulative bitch. When I first started working here, Lalage would regularly ask me if other employees talked about her when she wasn’t around. Of course they did, she’s Lalage, but I told her they didn’t. She finally told me the reason for her paranoia was Betty. Betty used to spread lies and rumors about everyone in the company. By the time she was let go, everyone hated each other.

As a result of all this, Lalage is constantly on my back, even three years later. She explains everything to me in great detail because she worries I’m as stupid as Betty. (“Now when you close the document, it’s going to ask you if you want to save it…”) Her paranoia has dissipated somewhat, but it’s still there to a degree and she sometimes asks me if people are talking about her.

Mostly what this all means is that at least once a week, I get to hear one of Lalage’s many Betty stories.

Lalage: Did I ever tell you about the time…

Me: Yes.

Lalage: …when Betty accidentally…

Me: Yes, I think you did.

Lalge: …threw away a fifty thousand dollar check…

Me: And then wouldn’t jump into the dumpster to recover it? Yes, you told me this.

Lalage: …and then wouldn’t jump into the dumpster to recover it? Can you believe that? You’d never do that.

Me: *sigh* You’re right. I’d be more than happy to crawl through trash to get your check back to save you the trouble of putting a stop payment on it and printing another.

Lalage: I know. That’s why you’re such a better employee than Betty.

The chickens did it.

Lalage coughed all day today. I asked her if she was okay. The exchange below is what followed.

Lalage: I’m fine. This just happens sometimes.

Me: It happens when you’ve been smoking. Are you smoking again?

Lalage: Off and on. I never cough from smoking, though.

Me: Oh, right.

Lalage: I think it’s the chickens. It’s a bronchial thing, like asthma. My throat closes up. It’s definitely the chickens.

I have no idea what to say in the face of such blatant silliness. Lalage, however, is quite sure of herself. There is no possible way it’s the smoking that’s making her cough.

It has occurred to me that this could be a defense. I’m an ex-smoker and I used to hate when non-smokers blamed every little health issue on my smoking. I just don’t think this is the case with Lalage, though. I think she really believes she is immune to smoker’s cough.

Things I’ve Learned Today

Heatstroke

1. If you’ve had chicken pox, you will get cold sores all your life and shingles when you’re older.

2. Every time you get a tan, your immune level goes down. The reason your skin gets dark is because your body is trying to heal itself.

3. Herpes wasn’t around when Lalage was a kid. It “just came out” about fifty years ago.

Number one isn’t all that stupid. It’s probably a fairly common misconception. Number two gets a little stupider. Number three is the best. All three statements came from the same conversation.

Lalage, while riding her horse over the weekend, got a little heatstroke. Her ordeal as she sat there sweating in the hot sun is all she’s been able to talk about since. Now she has a fever blister and it’s become the focus of her story. This sparked a discussion about herpes.

When she told me herpes has only been around for fifty years or so, I couldn’t hold back any longer and tried to tell her it’s always been around, it just wasn’t as well known or talked about as much as it is now. I should have known better than to correct her. She spent another thirty minutes “educating” me about the herpes virus and all its manifestations.

A word you don’t want to hear your co-workers use: crusty

She sure knows computers.

Today is a bad Lalage day.

There’s something wrong with our internet. It’s very slow and keeps dropping the connection. This, of course, is happening while we’re frantically trying to email something to our boss. Lalage is sure she can fix the problem, but I don’t have much faith. See, we’ve been here before.

Take the scanner, for instance. We got a shiny new document scanner so we can digitize our office. For most people, this is something you just plug in and then install software for. Lalage somehow made this process last a week.

It was the same thing when I got a new computer at my desk. Being at least thirty years younger than Lalage, I’ve spent a much higher percentage of my life with computers. For goodness sake, I know how to put one together and plug it in when it comes in a box from Dell. But she insisted I didn’t know what I was doing and managed to make an all day project out of setting it up.

Sometimes Lalage gets really stuck, as with the scanner. When that happens, I suggest perhaps she should call someone. You know, an IT guy, someone who does this sort of thing for a living. She says, “Why should we pay someone thousands of dollars to do something I can do just as easily? An IT guy will just do the same thing I’m doing.”

My internal response is, of course, “No, an IT guy will do the right thing and have it taken care of in five minutes.”

My actual response is, “But that would free you up to do your other work. You wouldn’t have to spend all your time on this.”

It’s all in vain, of course. Lalage always knows best.

Lalage-isms

1. Dying your hair brown will give you cancer. Just brown. All other colors are fine.

2. My computer can get a virus even if it is not internet capable and is not even turned on or plugged in.

3. The pictures on my hard drive are taking up too much room and slowing down my computer. (a: I have 294 GB of free space. b: My computer runs fine.)

4. We shred our office trash now because people used to go into the dumpster to steal our documents. (If you knew what kind of business this is, you’d know nobody is interested in any of our documents.)

5. Lalage can’t eat popcorn today because she got dehydrated yesterday and it would be unhealthy to eat “dry” food so soon.

6. People try to steal Lalage’s identity on a regular basis.

7. Our wireless internet is “hacked into” twenty thousand times a day.

8. The four or five croutons in my salad is what makes me so tired all the time. I need to stop eating so much bread.

9. This is the first job at which Lalage has been required to work a full five day week and she thinks it’s really unfair that this is expected of her.

10. Lalage’s children are terribly self-absorbed and she has no idea how they turned out that way.

Really? Goats?

That goat has devil eyes.

Lalage is not only a horse, dog and bird lover. She loves goats, too.

Lalage came to me a little while ago to discuss this news story with me. And by “discuss with me,” I mean “babble about at me.” If you don’t feel like clicking that (and, as it comes from Lalage, I don’t blame you), it’s a story about some insane woman who took her car in for an oil change or something. When the mechanic found a goat tied up in her trunk, he got the authorities involved. The woman said she was going to slaughter it. Or something. I don’t know.

Lalage was all worked up about the poor goat, which I understand. What I don’t understand is why she then chose to talk at me about the two goats she had back in the day when she lived on a farm. She rescued them from some kind of theme park/petting zoo thing that I guess was planning to kill the goats or something. As you can tell, I was already zoning out at this point.

It’s not that I mind hearing a heartwarming tale of animal rescue, but Lalage has the uncanny ability to take a one minute anecdote and turn it into a forty-five minute epic. Some of this is due to her constant self-interruption and subsequent backtracking, but mostly it’s because of the sheer amount of detail she puts into each and every story she tells. She made sure to tell me the goats’ names, their ages, what foods they liked, where they slept, what happened to them after she moved here and had to leave them behind…

Excuse me if I don’t tell you all about it. I stopped paying attention pretty early on.

Hold off on the chickens.

I thought for sure this week would be full of stories about Lalage’s new chickens, but something even bigger happened to distract her: she hurt her back. Apparently, on Friday night, Lalage was lifting something and her back just gave up.

A regular person would mention she hurt her back and then move on. Not Lalage. Every time she opens her mouth, it’s so she can either gasp in surprised pain or tell me directly how much her back hurts. Every situation turns into a story about how much her back hurts. I’m clearing some file boxes out of the boss’s office and Lalage appears, unbidden, at my side to tell me she’d help if her back wasn’t in such bad shape.

And she will not call a doctor.

Lalage says that going to a doctor will not magically make the pain go away. I say that neither will sitting around crying about it. She has assured me she will make an appointment if it doesn’t get better by the end of the week. In the meantime, I guess I get to listen to her moan and complain about it.

By the way, the chickens did arrive safely in the mail.