Weird day at the office. While we’re dealing with a very time sensitive well crisis, Greenway Plaza (which includes our building) loses power. It’s dark and the phones are dead. Throw in not one, but two evacuate the building fire alarms, stir with a security force that is hyper-aware that Yassar Arafat is dead and we’ve got the Israeli Consulate in here, and by 4:00 you have a well baked (and I mean it - no AC) crew in my office.
So the land guy sends his people home. My geophysicist trainee from India, Raj, comes up to me and says, “I guess I’ll move, now?”
What?
He meant, “I’ll go, now?”
Heh. I told him, “Move on, pal, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
One day a couple of months ago I was coming home on the bus. I had just been to an Esperanto get-together, and was reading a French comic magazine, so my mind was full of pictures, sounds, and not-English words.
Other people got on the bus and I looked up to see a woman reading a newspaper written in an unfamiliar language. Now, there are a lot of magazines and newspapers in a lot of languages in Toronto, and it was not surprising to see a new one–but I can usually sort of guess what language something is in, and I didn’t recognise this one. The language looked like a weird cross between Dutch and German, with a lot of Ms and Ns.
Suddenly something clicked. The newspaper was, of course, the Toronto Sun, in English.
Now I know what English looks like from the outside!
