That’s SIR Fatty McGee to you

I sit across from a fat British man at work. Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m sure that G is a very nice person. But for some reason, he’s a very nice person who has body-sound-A.D.D. The man is always making some sort of noise. He wheezes, he hums, he eats, he slurps, he sighs, he talks to himself, and most of all, he talks to his computer. The man is always moving, too. Today he organized his desk about 4 times. He went to the kitchen for about 7 cups of coffee (or tea perhaps…actually it probably was tea since I’m in the official Land of Tea and Crumpets). He made a deliciously aromatic cinnamon thing around 11 in the morning. And around 4 o’clock he told a co-worker that he had already had ¾ of a gallon of water today and does beer count for that last ¼ he’s supposed to drink to put him at his 1 gallon goal for the day since beer is mostly water anyway? But what makes him ALMOST endearing instead of bordering on homicidally annoying is that he does it all with the most proper of accents. How can I possibly fling my stapler at his bald head when he says, “Yessuh, but isn’t beeruh mostly wahter anyway, isn’t that riught?” (That was possibly the worst alliteration of a British accent ever, but it was the best I could do.)

I also happen to sit next to T. Just so you can picture him, he kind of looks like Ralph Fiennes only with inconsistent facial stubble. T is one of two people who I met today who I thought had a great personality in addition to being Britishly nice and polite. Seeing as how he sits next to me and my only other option was to talk to G about what kind of pie he brought for lunch, I chatted it up with T for most of the day. About four hours after we started talking (not continuously), he mentions something about being from Australia. At this point I mentally punch myself in the face for having JUST spent three months in that country and not being able to recognize the accent once I step foot in another land. Seriously. What is WRONG with me?!?! I can tell if someone is from Philadelphia within 4 seconds of talking to them, but trying to tell an accent from one side of the world from another is like rocket science.

Anyway, T was talking about going to Sydney earlier this decade for the Olympics and he said “…it was fairly special.” How did the word ‘fairly’ become one of those lost in translation words even though it’s the same language? Clearly he meant it was a VERY special thing, but I could have, and given my level of intelligence in the past 3 days alone I’m surprised I didn’t, mistaken him for thinking it was just a ho-hum affair. I’m fairly short. I’m fairly paranoid about alphabetizing my cd collection. I’m fairly in love with Pierce Brosnan.

Okay here’s something that is completely unacceptable. The computer keyboards in this country are f-ed up. They had to go and mess up everything by putting a British Pound sign where the # sign is. That means the keyboard creators had to improvise with where they put that instead. And so you know what they did? They cut the Enter key in half. In HALF I tell you!! Not to mention they cut the Shift key in half to make room for a backslash key. My pinkie fingers will be so strong by the end of my stint here from reaching half an inch further than they normally do. This might seem like I’m being nitpicky, but it’s ruining my world. Oh!! And get this! They put the quotation marks where the @ key is! I have to SHIFT AND USE MY RING FINGER! I’ll bet whosever idea it was to drive on the other side of the road came up with these ideas. (Obviously he was very old when he came up with the keyboard ideas. But old people can have ideas too, albeit terrible ideas right up there with drinking prune juice and then trotting around in Depends.)

Weather report: Rained today. Cloudy tomorrow.