Yesterday at work I was turning from the candy machine to make my way back to the desk when a pretty girl walked by in the hallway, smiled at me, and said “Hi” as she went past.
As I got back to the desk I said to Scott, “A pretty girl just smiled at me.”
His response was to ask, “How did that happen?”
I admitted that I didn’t know.
It wasn’t that he was surprised at the very idea of a pretty girl smiling at me, but under the circumstances – a Saturday in a place that on weekends is primarily staffed by overweight nerdy guys – it was unusual for there to be a pretty girl around to smile at anyone.
What made it especially odd is that she was headed off in a direction away from the areas in which anyone likely to be in working on a Saturday would be working.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen her – or the first time she’s smiled at me – but previously I had only seen her on weekdays.
In any case, the point is that, as I’ve often said, I don’t really ask for much out of life (or perhaps, more accurately, I don’t expect much out of life), so having a pretty girl smile at me can pretty much make my day, even if she only does so because she’s the sort of person who just smiles and says hi to people she encounters in hallways, and so, despite the mystery of who she was and what she was doing there on a Saturday, I kind of coasted along on that simple pleasure for the rest of the afternoon.
Of course, having to deal with traffic on the way home wiped out any lingering traces of happiness, and I had pretty much forgotten all about it by the time I got home.
Speaking of traffic and driving, a bit ago I encountered, as I have a few times in the past, the “No Red Light When You Want It” phenomenon.
It was a Thursday morning and I was making my way in to work. Early in the drive I realized that I should have put in a different CD before I’d left home, as I didn’t want to listen to what was in at the time. I thought, “Well, I have around 10 or 11 stoplights between here and work, so I’m bound to get stopped at one of them long enough to grab a different one and throw it in.”
I didn’t hit a single red light the whole way to work. Not a single one.
Traffic was thick enough that I didn’t want to risk making a swap while driving, and so I was stuck listening to a CD that I didn’t want to listen to.
Once I got to work I put in a different CD before shutting the car off and going in, so I was at least able to listen to something different on the way home.
Of course, come the next morning, I wasn’t especially interested in listening to that CD, and so, while stopped at a long light, I reached up to the CD holder on my visor and grabbed a different CD at random.
Said CD promptly flew out of my hand, bounced off the passenger side door, and ended up (I later discovered) on the floor behind the passenger seat, which prompted me to say, “No way did that just happen.”
Of course it had, and once the light turned green I once more avoided all subsequent red lights all of the way to work and once again listened to a CD I didn’t want to listen to.
Suffice to say that it has now become SOP to make sure that I want to listen to what’s in the CD player before I leave the parking lot in the morning.
So far my Sunday has been about as exciting as one would expect it to be. I tried and failed to take a nap, and am now just killing time until dinner, and then I’ll be watching another Bible-related show on The History Channel (this one about Exodus), and once that’s over it’ll nearly be time for a new episode of The Venture Bros.
And that will probably be the highlight of the week, but of course if anything exciting happens you’ll all be the first to hear about it.
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