Day Ninetytwo

They say that when you meet ten people, two won't like you, two will, and the rest won't care. With regards to the person about to be discussed, I'm one of the former.

She works for Corum Health Services. I found her among her colleagues in the dispensary when I arrived at work on Monday morning. She was a hefty woman with arms circumferencially equivalent to my thighs, and hair of a most unnatural tangerine. The chirpy, simpering qualities of her voice was juxtaposed with the testosterone-infused vocals of her colleagues.

Several chairs were moved into the dispensary to accommodate four extra arses and one hot-air balloon in a pencil skirt. Mirjana was furious about the mass invasion of her personal space.

I observed these people curiously. The men smiled back politely and the woman sneeringly looked me up and down, and it was then that I decided I did not like her.

A few hours later, our network remained non-existent and the Corum team remained idly lounging around displacing air. The woman was chatting about shopping. I was dispensing, but spared an ear.

"Every three weeks my girlfriend and I get together for our manicure and pedicure." She squeaked. "And once in awhile we'd go to Melbourne, bringing nothing except maybe an extra pair of jeans and a top, and then come back with a suitcase full of new clothes."

What's the point, I thought.

She then threw in "one sixteenth" into conversation, and John remarked that only a true geek would use fractions with denominators larger than three in smalltalk.

"Oh, well, you know, I'm geeky!" She gushed. "But I'm not all brains. I used to be a hairdresser, you know. How's that? I've got the best of both worlds."

Mirjana leaned over and muttered: "She's so full of herself."

For the past two days, she had been coming to the pharmacy alone to train Ismat on the new program for ordering and stock monitoring. Apart from being condescending, she had failed to answer most of Ismat's queries, because the answers were not given in the manual out of which she read. It reminded me very much of lecturers whose knowledge did not carry them outside the square, and when a question was directed at them that didn't quite fit within the learning objectives, they hastily changed the subject and in reply said something correct and completely irrelevant.

Of course, the unsmiling looks she directed at me made it marginally more difficult to hold back the cattiness.

Lunch-hour at Greenwood is more like lunch-30-minutes. We in the dispensary (i.e. me and Mirjana) don't have a break, and are usually found with a fork in one hand and a script in the other. Corum lady, on the other hand, took off at 12:00 pm for "a bite" and was still nowhere to be seen two hours later, leaving Ismat waiting at the training computer. I said she'll probably be back soon, probably just ravaging the last morsels of her spit roast.

It was closer to the truth than I expected.

At 2:30 pm I clocked off. Jez had been waiting for me at Greenwood but had toodled off to EB Games. I asked him to meet me back at the pharmacy. As I walked out of the shop, I encountered a couple of FUPAs doing what people usually do when they're horizontal and naked. My eyes were glued on them like a passer-by stares at a car accident.

I watched as the two of them ate each other's faces, and finally, with a glance so devastating, as if they would never exchange saliva again, they parted. In slow motion. Holding onto each other's hands until the combined lengths of their arms could not extend the distance between them.

The woman turned around and my jaw dropped. Corum woman walked back into our pharmacy, smirking to herself. So that's where she waddled off to. To have fat sex.

I doubled back into the dispensary and in whispers distorted by hysterical giggles told Mirjana what I had just saw. Top laugh!

And yet another riveting tale :)