Expectations
Yesterday I started my workday on one of MPOW’s other campuses, owing to a meeting with someone who wanted library-related information about a new project. (I am, as usual, being deliberately vague, because I don’t know how much information should be let roam free at this point.)
The meeting turned out to be an object lesson in the deceptions of linguistic register. From the emails sent me by the man I was to meet, I envisioned a formal, middle-aged professorial sort. The man I met was a smart, fresh-faced, enthusiastic youngster. I figure I’ve got ten or twelve years on him. Age and wiles, you know?
But I remember writing over-formal emails to my elders at his age. Hell, I still do it, if I’m scared enough. It turned out to be a fun, relaxed meeting about an extremely cool project that I think has good chances for success. If I helped it along, I’m happy.
It does give one to wonder, though, what he thought he’d be meeting. Probably not an ugly awkward elephant of a woman with a ridiculously deep voice and puppy-doggish enthusiasm about ’most everything. Somehow that’s not what people expect.
A blogger friend of mine confessed that she’d been afraid of meeting me; she’d magnified me into some kind of unholy fusion of Dorothy Parker and a buzz saw. (Dorothy Parker? In what bizarro universe?) I can’t imagine being afraid of meeting me. Does not compute. I’m so incredibly harmless that if I were any more harmless harm would stick to me like the opposite pole of a magnet. I’m just that harmless.
But… okay… if all somebody knows of me is the pigheaded rants on CavLec… I guess I can understand a dash of apprehension. Who wants to meet somebody capable of nothing but pigheaded rants?
I don’t think I was quite so much the pigheaded ranter when I was younger. Not, well, pigheaded enough. I daresay that I occasionally gave people the same turn that young man gave me, though; if nothing else about me is formidable, my vocabulary is, and always has been.
Eh, well. There are worse fates for him than to grow into someone like me, I will make bold to say. I may be turning into an old jade (thirty-four on Friday!), but I’m not turning jaded, and that’s what counts.