Work Words

This guy at work, we'll call him Al, the same guy who always sets off his car alarm when he gets into, or out of, his car, and also the guy who came in last week with the top 4 buttons of his shirt undone* (and not wearing and undershirt), sends out thousands of updates per day about where he is and what he's doing.

All of us rental techs are dispatched to our deliveries via blackberries. So it's nice to tell the supervisor (or me when he's on vacation) where you are. Little messages like "Done with Oakland, heading to Vacaville." Then, "Done with Vacaville, heading to Davis."

But Al sends updates about everything. "Going to Walnut Creek." "I'm here." "Done with Walnut Creek." "Traffic on 24E." Nobody needs to know when he arrives, just when he's done.

But once in a while his messages can be entertaining. My favorite extraneous page was when I was dispatching one morning and I had to send him straight from home to a delivery. After several messages back and forth to work out the details, he sent me the following:

I know this place already.
If you can get the address
of the last one I sent you in
Concord? That will be great.
I have to prepare now and
take a bath. Talk to you later.

Most importantly, I did not need to know he was about to take a bath. Less importantly, but still perplexing is who takes baths? Especially for the purposes of getting ready for work.

In other word news, my supervisor has been known to get a few well known words consistently wrong. For instance, when he transposes some numbers he'll say, "I'm getting dilexic in my old age." Most of his slips I'm well used to, but today I discovered a new one when he said that tonight he's having polar sausage for dinner.

Sausage made from polar bears? Sausage which aligns itself on the plate, north to south? Cold sausage?

* It remains unclear as to whether or not he did this on purpose. He always has more buttons undone than most people find appropriate (2 or 3), but the whole shirt only has 7 buttons. Have the majority of buttons undone seems like it has to be an accident. The world may never know.