So I might be having more of an effect on literacy and left-turn signaling than I’d realized, and, by being pleasant and polite, could stop the downward trend to rudeness.
Of course, Browning had never met Flip. But it was worth a try, and I had the comfort of knowing I couldn’t possibly make things worse.
So, even though Flip had made no effort to pick up the spilled pages and was, in fact, standing on one of them, I smiled at her and said, “How are you this morning?”
“Oh, just great,” she said sarcastically. “Perfectly fine.” She flopped down onto the hair-bobbing clippings on my lab table. “You will not believe what they expect me to do now!”
A little work? I thought uncharitably, and then remembered I was supposed to be following in Pippa’s footsteps. “Who’s they?” I said, bending to pick up the spilled pages.
“Management,” she said, rolling her eyes. She was wearing a pair of neon-yellow tights, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a very peculiar down vest. It was short and bunched oddly around the neck and armpits. “You know how I’m supposed to get a new job title and an assistant?”
“Yes,” I said, continuing to smile. “Did you? Get a new job title?”
“Ye-es,” she said. “I’m the interdepartmental communications liaison. But for my assistant, they expect me to be on a search committee. After work.”
Along the bottom of the vest there was a row of snaps, a style I had never seen before. She’s wearing it upside down, I thought.
“The whole point was I was overworked. That’s why I have to have an assistant, isn’t it? Hello?”
Wearing clothing some other way than was intended is an ever-popular variety of fad—untied shoelaces, backward baseball caps, ties for belts, slips for dresses—and one that can’t be put down to merchandising because it doesn’t cost anything. It’s not new, either. High school girls in 1955 took to wearing their cardigan sweaters backward, and their mothers had worn unbuckled galoshes with short skirts and raccoon coats in the 1920s. The metal buckles had jangled and flapped, which is how the name flapper came about. Or, since there doesn’t seem to be agreement on the source of anything where fads are concerned, they were named for the chickenlike flapping of their arms when they did the Charleston. But the Charleston didn’t hit till 1923, and the word flapper had been used as early as 1920.
“Well,” Flip said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
It was no wonder Pippa had just gone singing past her clients’ windows. If she’d had to put up with them, she wouldn’t have been half as cheerful. I forced an interested expression. “Who else is on the committee?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t have time to go to these things.”
“But don’t you want to make sure you get a good assistant?”
“Not if I have to stay after work,” she said, irritably pulling clippings out from under her. “Your office is a mess. Don’t you ever clean it?”
“ ‘The lark’s on the wing;/The snail’s on the thorn,’ ” I said.
“What?”
So Browning was wrong. “I’d love to talk,” I said, “but I’d better get started on this funding form.”
She didn’t show any signs of moving. She was looking aimlessly through the clippings.
“I need you to make a copy of each of those. Now. Before you go to your search committee meeting.”
Still nothing. I got a pencil, stuck the extra pages into the application, and tried to focus on the simplified funding form.
I never worry much about getting funding. It’s true there are fads in both science and industry, but greed is always in style. HiTek would like nothing more than to know what causes fads so they could invent the next one. And stats projects are cheap. The only funding I was requesting was for a computer with more memory capacity. Which didn’t mean I could forget about the funding form. It wouldn’t matter if your project was a sure-fire method for turning lead into gold, if you don’t have the forms filled out and turned in on time, Management will cancel you like a shot.
Project goals, experimental method, projected results, matrix analysis ranking. Matrix analysis ranking?
I flipped the page over to see if there were instructions, and the page came out altogether. There weren’t any instructions, there or at the end of the application. “Were there instructions included with the form?” I asked Flip.
“How would I know?” she said, getting up. “What’s this?” She stuck one of the clippings under my nose, an ad of a bobbed blonde standing next to a Hupmobile.
“The car?”
“No-o-o,” she said, letting her breath out in a big sigh. “Her hair.”
“A bob,” I said, and leaned closer to see if the hair was cut in an Eton bob or a shingle. It was crimped in even rows down the sides of her head. “A marcel wave,” I said. “It was a permanent wave done with a special electrical metal-and-wires apparatus that was about as much fun as going to the dentist,” but Flip had already lost interest.
“I think if they’re going to make you stay after work or make you do extra jobs they should pay you overtime. Like stapling all these funding forms and delivering them to everybody. Some of them were supposed to go all the way down to Bio.”
“Did you deliver one to Dr. O’Reilly?” I said, remembering her habit of dumping packages on closer offices.
“Of course. He didn’t even thank me. What a swarb!”
“Swarb?” I said. Fads in language are impossible to keep up with, and I don’t even try from a research standpoint, but I know most of the slang because that’s how fads are described. But I’d never heard this one.
“You don’t know what swarb means?” she said, in a tone that made me wish Pippa had gone around Italy slapping people. “No hots. No cutes. Cyber-ugg. Swarb.” She flailed her duct-taped arms, trying to think of the word. “Completely fashion-impaired,” she said, and flounced out in her duct tape and upside-down down. Without the clippings.
Coffeehouse [1450–1554]
Middle Eastern fad that originated in Aden, then spread to Mecca and throughout Persia and Turkey. Men sat cross-legged on rugs and sipped thick, black, bitter coffee from tiny cups while listening to poets. The coffeehouses eventually became more popular than mosques and were banned by the religious authorities, who claimed they were frequented by people “of low costume and very little industry.” Spread to London (1652), Paris (1669), Boston (1675), Seattle (1985).
Saturday morning the library called and told me my name had come up on the reserve list for Led On by Fate, so I went to Boulder to pick it up and buy a birthday present for Brittany.
“You can have Angels, Angels Everywhere, too, if you want,” Lorraine told me at the library. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a dalmatian on it and red fireplug earrings. “We finally got two more copies now that nobody wants them.”