No one impresses me more than people who look at spreadsheets on planes.  I watch them as I pick stray pieces of tobacco off my Fruit Stripes gum. This is what real people look like.  This is what real people look at.  Long numbers with letters and dashes in them that are sorted into columns and then rows.  And they mean something!  They mean so many things.  And they are on pages and these pages were obviously printed off one of those big printers that goes really fast.  These pages are in notebooks and if these pages got mixed up – like if the person reading them dropped these pages and they got all out of order – that would fuck that person up.  Because all of the columns with the numbers and the rows have to be in order you see?  Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.

And It has to be done now.  Otherwise SOMETHING is going to happen.  And I don’t know what that something is, but they know.  And they don’t want that thing to happen.  Or they do.  Or I don’t know cause I’m not in that world.

These are the real people of the world.  They never find donuts in their backpacks.  They don’t congratulate themselves every time they buy stamps.  They eat apples and have tailors.  They get haircuts and bags for their yoga mats.  They drink coconut water and use hand cream.  They have a plumber they could recommend to you.

Every once in a while, one of the spreadsheet people will catch me staring at them.  I play it cool.  Let them think I’m one of them.  I lean back and pop my Fruit Stripes into my mouth.

“Tell me about it…” I say with a wink.

Then I pull out my list of Cosby episodes I can remember by heart, and I get back to work.

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December 25, 2011

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