Eileen was my worst officemate ever, because I didn’t supervise her and thus couldn’t make her stop telling me about when she was pregnant with her son when she was thirteen, “the year they built the arch.” (Which, damn, means she was about my current age when I thought of her as a “horrible old woman.”) Also, she had this boyfriend who had lost his voicebox (and/or bits nearby) to cancer and spoke with a vocoder and, after she unexpectedly married somebody who was not him over a weekend, he would call my phone extension to threaten immediate robot suicide if Eileen didn’t call him back and promise to divorce the new husband and come back to him right away. I would say, “I’m sorry, but Eileen is working in another building and I won’t be able to get a message to her until tomorrow, but I’m happy to write her a note and leave it on her desk. What shall I say?”
“You tell her it’s going to be tonight!”
“What is, sir?”
“She knows what I mean. And it’s important. You walk it right over to her wherever she is and you tell her.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t leave my desk at the moment. Perhaps you could leave a message for her at home.”
“I don’t want to talk to HIM.”
“Okay, well I’ll be sure she gets the note tomorrow.”
“Oh, nevermind! I’ll call back tomorrow!” ::PHONESLAM::
Then, Eileen would call his sister and his family would make sure he had company while he drank that night, and the next day it would all start again. And, in thanks, I’d get a story from Eileen like “Did I ever tell you how I came to be raising my little sister’s son right along with mine? Well, she was only ten months younger than me and we both had our boys that same year and I was in the car by my parents’ house down in south county, with both the boys in the backseat and my first husband (‘cept we wasn’t quite married yet) driving, and she was on the back of her husband’s motorcycle behind us. And my husband hit the brakes when a racoon run into the road just as we turn the corner and go towards the driveway, and the bike run into the back of the car, dented up the trunk bad, and there they both was, dead as Kelsey’s nuts in our momma’s roses.”
And, you know, I was twenty-two and mostly just needed to know if she was out of paperclips, so I could finalize the supply order.
I first encountered keywords with Eileen. She’d start psyching up to tell me a story, kind of rehearsing it in her head, and I’d hear “second cousin Darren, third husband, threshing machine” and just point at her and say “No.” — like I’d learned from my grandma’s dog-training videos.
pavedwithexcess 