The tea-lady

The tea-lady is normally that maternal type who always has a kind word for you in and around the work-place, pleasing everyone with her idiosyncracies and generally justifying her place on the pay-roll with tales of yesteryear and cups of tea. (Of course, a tea-lady could just well as be a tea-man, though I am yet to come across one doing it quite so successfully as their female counterpart.)

In the maths department, we do not have a tea-lady but instead have a post-lady, and at some point down the line, somebody forgot to tell her that she was supposed to be the nice, sweet one around the place and not the brooding hulk of melancholia and disgruntlement that she actually is. Unfortunately, it seems that I don't do much to help the situation...

The first time we met was when I decided to make a cup of tea in the galley (which is just the little tea, photocopying, stationery and pigeon-hole room). The sink is positioned just to the right of the block of pigeon-holes and as I moved to wash my tea-spoon there whilst the post-lady was putting away some post, so she told me to "just wait a minute" whilst she finished off her job. I think I muttered something about there being enough room for the both of us, but decided not to pursue it for fear of never receiving a piece of mail again. Suffice to say, she was less than impressed with me.

And so it has gone virtually every time I've made a cup of tea. I don't know what it is (actually, I do: she waits in the department all morning waiting for me to go and make my wake-me-up cup of tea and then does the mail-sorting); we can't carry on like this, so someone is going to have to make some sort of conciliatory move before the season of goodwill has passed us by.

I'll be damned if it's going to be me, though, so we'll just have to see what she has to say about that.