It's Scary, But Nobody Cares

The below is a story I like to trot out at dinner parties to demonstrate the range of humans you can hit (probably should rephrase that…) encounter, in a couple of minutes in a cab.

I picked the first passenger up from an installation that looked like it had featured in the X-Files. All radar dishes and automated security. The normal pleasantries occur and I ask the guy what he does up here, and does the CIA pay well.

He laughs and says, “I work for a tel-co actually. I steer communications satellites.”

“Cool, a genuine rocket scientist in my cab. I’m surprised to hear that you steer satellites. I thought you parked them in the right place and then you let speed and gravity do the rest.”

“No, they need correction, they are very rarely stuck in the exactly the right place and the orbit decays. We also have to save a little bit of fuel for the end of its life, to push it away and let it disappear into space when it's time to replace it.”

He then went into a lengthy and interesting explanation of how the Chinese weren’t doing that, and were cluttering up their space lanes with dead and dying satellites. I like spacey type stuff, and he liked space and worked with it professionally, so I was pleased with the exchange.

When he got out, he held the door open for a girl who got in and greeting behaviour started all over again.

“Hey, how’s your day?” I ask.

“Oh really tough, I’ve had a really tough day,” She says, raising her hand to her tortured brow.

“Wow, how come?” I’m impressed, she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders, but she’s bearing up.

“I design teddy bears for a soft toy manufacturer,” She explains.

“I’ll be honest here, you’ve said you’ve had a tough day, and I can see that you have. But I would’ve thought that designing teddy bears would be right up there in the ‘benign things to do for a living’ stakes. I mean it just sounds so cute. And at the end you get to hold up a teddy bear and say Look what I did today!'”

“Yeah, normally it is, but today the Lions Club came in and wanted a special order of animals,” She says, barely containing the tears.

“Uhmmm, I’m gonna go out on a limb hear and guess that they wanted some lions?” I say as nicely as possible.

“Yes!” She sobs. “They wanted lions, they’re not like bears. They’re harder.”

“I know what you mean,” I lie. “Let’s just hope that the Balmain Rugby League team doesn’t hit you up for some merchandise next week then, hey?”