About four months ago, we hired a new lady to work in a department far off from mine.  Her name is Luckie.  She’s cute, funny, and dresses fantastically odd.  She bubbles over with cheer.  I know this because she, at random moments, will jettison past my cubicle for supplies (the supply room is down the hall).  She frequently pops by and loudly proclaims how amazing it is to be alive or something equally observant.  Our work interactions are rare, but they are predominantly done via e-mail.  She always seemed happy, neat, and fun.  Why not move on to lunch? I thought to myself.  Yesterday, I bravely whipped up a fairly nonchalant e-mail about having lunch sometime.  She responded within thirty seconds that we’d be having lunch tomorrow… so, today was that lunch.

WOW!  It’s amazing how wrong you can be about someone when you only know them at work and only hang out during work functions.  Lunch is an out-of-building experience and felt like an out-of-body experience.  Thank goodness my sunglasses are orange mirrors or she would have seen the look of horror/shock/bewilderment that ran over me during our brief outing.  Every other word was a curse and not just a curse, a fairly violent exclamation of a curse, as if they were all in caps and underlined and she had been saving it all until she was outside the building.  Also, she is under the very wrong impression that I am brilliant.  How did she get this impression?  I don’t know.  She was picking my brain with the weirdest questions, which thankfully, I knew the answers to…  I don’t remember most of what was discussed.  I do know that part of it was in German and I understood it, which surprised me.

The whirlwind that was lunch was over quickly and she walked me upstairs to my cubicle.  Okay?  Then, she hugged me and told me how much fun it was to hang out with me!  I was hugged… I had forgotten my dislike of hugs until that moment.  Boy likes hugs, so I got used to hugging Boy.  My sister likes hugs, so I got used to hugging my sister (and my niece, who is so adorable).  But, yeah… the hugs stop there.  I thought maybe that I had changed my mind about the hugging thing, but no.  I don’t like hugs.  I felt… accosted.  Anyway, she left with a flip of her hair and I had an e-mail within a minute.  I’ve created a lunch lady monster.  And I never even got to ask why her parents named her Luckie.  Not a big deal, but I’ve been curious.