Signing up!

As a part of setting our rented apartment up, I called up a telephone service provider. It took us, I & the customer service representative, the better part of two minutes to get through all the information that was needed to set us up with a landline connection.

The representative first guessed my name as a Greek one. And then, as he was entering all the information into the system & going through the process of setting my account up, he told me how he had been to Sri Lanka on the ship he worked for back in 1980 ( & said I was exactly three years old then by the way of proving his arithmetic abilities!), & how he had wandered off into the streets looking for local cuisine, & how he had eaten one of everything on offer in a local restaurant ( he did not say whether he had paid for each one, too), & how the color of his face had changed with the spice content of each dish. He then said that it was quite a show & children gathered all around him laughing at this quaint American doing strange things. And he said, that, not knowing how to react, he decided to join the children in their merry laughter.

He went on to say that how similar people are anywhere you go, & how governments just represent the politics of a country & how this representation is often mistaken for what people are like.

At this point, he said I was all set & thanked me for bringing up fond memories.