I See Alive People

This one goes back to my 'working in an office days', you know, when I used to work with real people (in person) and not just talk to people (who look how I think they do and not how they actually do) over the phone. If you have ever had conversations with someone you are doing work for or with (that you have never met in person), you know what I mean. The picture you have in your head is almost always not what the person looks like at all.

One perfect example was when I first excepted the position I am in now a couple years ago. I had to do a lot of work with this one man over the phone, who, incidentally, sounded like he was in his 60's, walked with a cane, and was 4 feet tall - let's call him Walter.

A couple of months after having started working with Walter, he and a bunch of folks from the project came to my area. They decided to go out to dinner one of the nights and invite me, so I went. Thank goodness I had met 1 of the 20 people in the group in person previously, otherwise I wouldn't have known who anyone was.

Anyways, I showed up, saw the lady I knew and said hello. She started introducing me to everyone and as she was doing this I was looking around for the short, elderly man I knew as Walter. To my surprise, I couldn't find him anywhere. Then, all of a sudden I was standing next to a giant (I mean like a NBA-basketball-tall-kind-of-giant). A giant who was not old, in fact, he seemed to be in his early 50's maybe late 40's. Even more surprising was that the giant was Walter. 'What on Earth!?' I thought and 'Man, I am terrible at this game.' Nowadays I'm on the phone with people so much for work (that I may never meet in person) that we sometimes send pictures of ourselves to each other.

Anyways, to get back to the original story. One day I was working in my cube, I had lots of cube mates and many who I didn't even know what their names were. So, I was working in a cubicle that looked a lot like this:

I was sitting and working on the inside corner when I saw a guy that I didn't know (in my peripheral vision) walk past the cubicle. I continued to work until I saw him pass by again going in the opposite direction. Then, for some reason, he stopped. I turned around to see him standing there, just looking at me. I'm looking at him, he's looking at me, I'm looking at him, he's looking at me - this continued for at least 5-10 seconds, you get the idea (basically we were just staring at each other).

Then, all of a sudden he decided to say something. My response, of course, was to scream "AHHHHHH!" It was like he was a statue that shouldn't be able to speak or something, that kind of scream. After I gained my composure back I started to laugh and said "I'm soo sorry, I'm not sure why I screamed. I knew you were standing there, I was looking right at you." He started to laugh also and every time I saw him after that in the office we both just laughed, for years and still to this day, if I see him we both laugh.

What is wrong with me!? Clearly, Binderclips and I have had this happen too many times.