Transperabeeeleeeteee

Quarters are tight at Big Financial. I'm in a small cubicle with Rosita, a no-nonsense Puerto Rican woman who has a sense of humor that is dangerously like my own.

I'm supposedly working on two projects now. One is with a Filipino woman name Corazon. The project is about the transferability of milk bottle options. Transfer from where? Who knows! To where? A mystery for the ages. I've been trying to get information out of her for two days and all I've gotten so far is, "I'm reeellleeee beezeee right now."

But I was asked to listen in on a conference call going over the business requirements (hey! Wasn't I supposed to write those?).

Corazon, as it turns out, sits directly over the cube wall from me, so I was getting her piercing Filipino accent in stereo.

And so was Rosita.

After the morning's conference call, Rosita said, "Gawd, the way she said Susie's name! I'd change my name just so I would never have to hear her call me that again."

I said, "Soooo-ceeee" and Rosita snorted.

Then after lunch, there was there afternoon conference call. I whispered to Rosita, "Are you ready for transperabeeleetee?" Rosita laughed so hard she cried. I did too.

And it wasn't a lot about mocking somebody's accent, but how Corazon delivered her lines - very aggressively, very no-bs, very "this is how is has to be" no matter that the men and women on the other end of the line were having major cases of the fantods.

I sent another email to Corazon, asking for links to the documents she had just sent everyone else but had - oops! - forgotten to send to me.

"Nononononono," she said at one point, "Eye ahm de beesknees analees."

Well. I'm not here to start a fight. But as I told Rosita, there will be a day when our boss, Ludmilla, comes over for a reckoning and I don't want to say I got nothing because the project manager wanted to play tug of war with me.

Because I am de beesknees analees.