I was walking down a hallway yesterday morning in the building where I work-actually in the building where I have an office and the people in charge pay me-how much work I actually do has been a subject of no small amount of less than kind speculation for some time, and I'm trying to keep us all honest but reamin low profile at the same time.
Which is actually how I kind of got into trouble, more or less. A pair of coworkers, vaguely known to me as in 'oh yeah, they work here' were chatting with one another as they walked in my direction (or I in theirs, you decide). I don't know their names or where they work, it's a big building and from space we all look the same and it's not like I'm going shoe-shopping with them anytime soon. I rarely, if ever, see/recognize any of the people with whom I work, outside of work, to (I suspect) every one's great relief, but most especially mine.
Anyway as I'm walking past them, I hear one say to the other '...and in Berlin, they have this huge Hoff Brow House, with all kinds of beer..." And the other guy is hanging on every word. Well, Starbuck, it's not exactly in Berlin and it was Thursday and I had already had about all the cajun pablum for the week anyone should ever have to eat, so I turned around and asked sharply, maybe a little sharper than necessary, 'do you mean the Hofbrauhaus in Munich?' to which the beer expert, surprised to be called out, nodded jerkily in assent.
He offered 'you know there's not much difference between Berlin and Munich' which is true if you're a blind horse, I guess, and that's about as close a reference to that damned pony ride for my birthday that I'll risk for today. I asked him if the same could be said about the difference between Berlin, Germany and Berlin, Connecticut (look! There's JFK!) and he wisely decided that this was a good time to answer his cell phone that wasn't ringing. Too bad, I was going to offer him a jelly doughnut. I believe Marlene Dietrich packed an extra one.
-bill kenny
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