YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
Dear Mary.. .
Q. Soon after my arrival in small-town Alabama I was surprised — and elated to see a tie I recognised. I hailed its owner and asked when he had been with that particular regiment. He hadn't been, of course. The tie was a trophy — with sever- al others — of a tourist trip to the Burlington Arcade. Until recently the pride of his collection had been the stripy tie 'of some Royal Guards soldiers' but then the owner's father had died, raising the question of what to bury him in since he had never owned anything smart. `Hell, he had no reason to until he died!' After much family discussion, Grandpa had been laid to rest wearing the Guards tie nicely set off by a shiny, pale-blue suit. All foreigners here are exposed to this sort of Richter scale 6 culture shock, and it is against this background that I ask you to gauge my present predicament. A Korean has recently arrived in the office. Re is extremely nice and when I first met him I offered him a cup of coffee. I then Made the mistake of waving airily towards my coffee machine and telling him to top himself up if he wanted. He now thinks that he can wander into my office at will and help himself. Since I have two coffee machines I offered to bring my spare in for him — it didn't work. 'But why we need anudder?' he asked with deep con- cern. 'Is the one we have broke?' I am at a loss what to do now. He is truly pleasant, and I am keen to avoid shaking his already shaky cultural foundations by the equiva- lent of burying my father in a pale-blue suit and a Guards tie. On the other hand, I like my own coffee at my own pace and in my own time — and on my own. Any advice you can offer will be gratefully received but should not require complicat- ed language skills. Anything in words of one syllable will be OK.
Name withheld, Alabama. A. Thank you for your lengthy, but enjoy- able, query. Why not deal with this issue by removing the fuse from, or otherwise disabling, the socket into which your cof- fee machine is plugged? This will enable you to move the machine through to an alternative area, perhaps adjacent to your Korean colleague's desk, while you await the arrival of the service engineers whom, needless to say, you will not bother to alert to the dysfunction. After a few days, during which time your colleague will become used to the new arrangement, you can introduce your spare machine into your personal office. 'Lucky we have two machines now!' you can cry, pointing to your bottom. 'Me, very constipated. I must add fibre powder to my own mixture of coffee to make me go to toilet. Not many other people like this! Everyone else use this machine. Me, I have fibre coffee!'
Mary Killen
If you have a problem, write to Dear Mary, do The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London, WC1N 2LL.
Previous page
