Socially Challenged

picture by massdistraction

There are some very splendid things about working in an Investment Bank and one of them is the personal training that we receive in the good years.

I've worked in the City a long time and there have been very many good years; and I have received a lot of personal training. Some of it I even remember.

So this morning there I was in the hustle and bustle of the breakfast-time canteen, only slightly knackered after my 8.5km pre-work run and entirely focussed on toasting my reward bagel (pumpkin seed, to be lightly done with butter and marmite), but the toaster was running too fast - or too cool - so that the conveyor belt was delivering a flow of hot-but-still-raw bread products, each retrieved with increasing impatience by their owners and returned for a second, or even third, passage through the deeply disappointing inferno.

And so I was tut-tutting with rest of them and huff-puffing with the best of them, and then for some reason I remembered my old coach and the well-meaning, if uncomfortable, challenges she used to set me: like smiling at strangers, just for the hell of it; and a little bit of nostalgia, or recklessness, or madness must have crept over me for suddenly, and quickly before I could change my mind, I turned to bloke behind me (two slices of unappetising, limp white sliced bread, third time through) and I smiled brightly and said: 'Huh, well it may be annoying for us, but anyone with a hitherto unfulfilled craving for very warm, but yet completely uncooked bakery goods must be having a great morning"

And he smiled back warmly and said "They sure must be" and then turned away from me to claim as it tumbled from the conveyor his steaming but still totally white bread and as he did so he muttered quietly, but perfectly distinctly under his breath, 'wierdo'

I should realised that he was the dangerous, humourless type, from the bread.