Funny. I Don’t LOOK Like a Wet Blanket…

“So what you’re gonna wanna do?  Is you’re gonna wanna access the report?  The report I sent you yesterday?”
I shouldn’t be listening in, but I can’t help it.  Here on the Cube Farm – and just one row over – a young woman is on the phone and struggling with the declarative sentence.
My heart goes out to her.
And I grab a pen.
“Kaylee/Riley/Taylor/Xena’s language skirmish is giving me a headache? And I vacillate?  Between telling her?  And lobbing a paperclip torpedo at her head?”
She continues, despite my ardent and, so far, unexpressed desire that she shut up just the tiniest of bits.  The sing-song, almost Valley Girl-like pattern of her speech has been wiggling into my brain for 12 minutes now.
This is not how good Minneapolitans speak.
“I sent it to you earlier? At, like, 2:00?  If you sort?  By “received”?  You should be able to find it that way?”
I remove my glasses, press the heels of my hands into my eyeballs until I hallucinate exploding tapestries of red and black.  “La la la la laaaaaa”.
My cube-mate, Tamra, looks at me sideways.  “You’re going to hurt yourself,” she says.
“I’m sorry?  My brain?  Keeps sliding up a musical scale?  Toward a sentence that sounds like a question but isn’t?”
Tamra makes a face I interpret to be commiseration. 
“I’m going to contact HR,” I say.  “I think my rights are being violated.”
Tamra grins, shakes her head, returns to her screen, returns to whatever it is that she does over there.
And I go back to discovering my inner curmudgeon.