Today our facilities lady posted a "Welcome" sign on the vacant cube across from me, and said, "Oooh, Tara, you get a new guy sitting across from you! His name is Shawn." I feigned as much enthusiasm as I could until she rounded the corner. I mean, really. Long ago I stopped being excited to meet new people here, never mind casting any thought toward romantic involvement. Not that I would ever date someone I work with (wink!), but anyway I'm not really looking right now. Least of all, here.
As you may know, I work at an engineering firm outside of Fort Worth as a software engineer. This is the trifecta of social ineptitude; the triple-threat. Engineering firms employ mostly men, and roughly 97% of these men a) are over 35 years old, and b) have no personality. Add to that the fact that we're in a small town in Texas, and you get an army of drones espousing antiquated gender mores. They are truly the WASPiest of the WASPs.
Software engineers are a subset of this breed; as engineers go, they are at the far end of the normalcy spectrum, somewhere around Micheal Jackson and that lady on the corner smoking Kools and mumbling about her son, Jimmy Carter, who lives on the moon.
One of my compatriots has a poster of a horse taped up on the wall next to his cube. Well, poster isn't exactly the appropriate term. It's really more of a giant store display for something called "Knicker-Makers". Careful that you don't get too close; a proximity sensor in the display elicits an enthusiastic "neeeeeeeigh" when you enter a 5-foot radius. I'm not altogether sure, but I think he does it so he can safely look at "explicit content" on the 'net without being snuck up on. And by explicit content, I of course mean Amish porn.
Another hasn't quite figured out that women, too, are carbon-based life forms. His MO: the stand-there-and-stare-with-a-blank-expression-while-making-awkward-statements method. "Hi, Tara." Pause. Blink blink. "I heard you were from Slidell." Blink. "I have some family there, too." Head tilt.
I have to get out of here, or I'm going to become a hermit.
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