Many Meetings

Yesterday afternoon, I walked out of Avery Hall with an architecture student from a different studio. We both felt the other looked familiar, although he was more certain that I was. After talking for a moment, we discovered that we were both UW-Madison students. Discussing the campus and life in the Madtown, we found that not only did we go to the same school, but we had lived in the same dorm. Needless to say, we were both quite surprised.

Today, I had a more intentional run-in with a different Langdonite. Rachel, who is in the city to work for ABC, also works at a Starbucks on the Upper East Side. I headed over there and ate my breakfast while she concocted various overpriced drinks for the wealth residents of that area. I greatly enjoyed seeing her again, if only for a short while. The most interesting part of the visit, however, was my random encounter with someone from Great Barrington. She wasn't a Simon's Rock alumna, but had gone to the boarding school in town (in the days before the school catered to troubled students).

To be efficient, I made a stop at the near-by FedEx Kinko's before breakfast. It was pretty empty in there, but the one other customer kept the employee's hands full. Some middle-aged woman was trying to do some tricky double-sided, collated, stapled packets, and was unsurprisingly having difficulties. She yelled a lot, and demanded her few cents back every time she failed to get it right, which was every two or three minutes. The guy trying to help her was very patient, and when he came over to input a password at my Sony PictureStation, I learned that he was recently from Guam, and had to deal with rich, snotty women like her on a daily basis. When I went up to pay for my photos, the woman was screaming that one side was blank, and it wasn't stapling. I cheered up the staff a bit by complaining that my photos were also blank on one side and unstapled. The woman, thankfully, was too absorbed in her own problems to hear.