Collegiality

[muckefuck]

Finally had to send my student employee downstairs to file so that we could get some damn work done. He's extremely sharp and affable (pretty much the polar opposite of Zombie Boy), so I need to stay on my guard lest he get me started on one of our many common subjects of interest. I must be a little off my game today, but telling me about his Chinese architecture class was really hardball. I mean, I was in the Forbidden City just three months ago!

We wandered from that topic to family history...hmm, how did that happen? Oh, right: Chinese architecture > Chinese Muslim architecture > Kaifeng Jews > family traditions. He was telling me how his grandmother used to read from his grandfather's journal of being stationed in Burma during WWII. Of twenty-one men who trekked back to India with him after the destruction of their post office, only three others survived. He only made it because of a big ol' Punjabi Sikh who used to shelter him from frigid mountain downpours by standing over him. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?

You see what I mean. How am I supposed to concentrated on transfers and what-not with distractions like this?

Comments

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

Clearly you should stop trying to hire the smart ones. This is a useful warning for me, since I just started my research assistant. So far I've been safe, though, since I've given her tasks that require her to wear the Bose noise-canceling headphones.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's a tough niche: Smart enough that I don't have to repeat my instructions a hundred times, yet dull enough that they won't try to leave or start gaming me.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

it's especially awesome if you have a thing for being protected by big Punjabi Sikhs. The beards. The daggers.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Hanuman in a Humvee, don't get me started! (If I end up writing The Very Secret Diary of My Student Worker's Grandfather in my head later today, I am so coming through the ethernet to kick your ass.)

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

You know, my wife's grandfather escaped the Russian Civil War by crossing the Black Sea in a rowing boat, which was to have been towed across by another ship, but was abandoned mid-way when the ship thought it was going to be intercepted by a Red patrol. He was also one of only a few survivors out of a large group. A civil engineer by training, he supported himself by playing the piano in bars in Istanbul, until the revolution there made things difficult, and eventually by painting landscapes in Brazil. We have a very natty photo of him in Tsarist military uniform.

...no burly Sikh gentlemen in the story, though.