A Person, Place, or Thing

My parents got along very well (which you can probably guess, considering they were married 51 years and had three children), but one of the things that irked my dad was that my mom often doesn't use nouns. I usually could figure out what she was talking about, but then again, I was a product of them both, so maybe it was genetic.

One of my coworkers (the housekeeping manager, whom I have yet to nickname), however, drives me crazy for exactly the same reason. For a couple of weeks, she has been fretting about not knowing when basketball practice starts (so she can change her locker room cleaning schedule or sweep the floor or something). So, yesterday, when she said she would assume practice would begin after the students' fall break (which is this weekend), I was all right -- until she said she then would start cleaning the mats every day.

Mats? Basketball doesn't involve mats. Oh, wait, you mean wrestling, not basketball? Sheesh. How could I possibly have misunderstood? It would be just like boarding an ...um... but the ...um... won't tell you the ...um...

The manager does this with her general conversations (i.e. gossip), too. She enjoys eating lunch with me in the dining hall and saying, "Oh, he's a drinker," or, "She's been married four times," or, "They were seen coming out of a room in Such-and-Such Hall together, and neither one of them has an office in that building." When her stories get lengthy, starting about the woman she saw, then the woman's daughter, then granddaughter (or even stories about her own grandchildren), she'll keep saying "she", and I start wondering if so much could happen to a single person (outside of a soap opera, at any rate) -- and then she'll toss in a "he", and I will be totally confused about whom she is discoursing.

I've thought of one way to amuse myself with her habit of dropping nouns, rather than be irritated by it. I'll just plug in random words myself, kind of like Mad Libs. Of course, there's the danger of chuckling out loud in meetings because I'm so witty, but it'll help pass the time.