She looked up from the desk as I walked in. ‘I don’t have time for your crap this morning, Lou.’
‘You’re in luck, Gloria,’ I said, holding out the bag I‘d been left holding. ‘ This is someone else’s crap. Woman left it in my office by accident.’
‘Humph!’ She took the bag out of my hand and turned to put it in the pick-up box for the lab pickup.
I’m a man who appreciates the finer things in life. As she bent over to put it in the box, I appreciated how fine a figure she had.
‘Well?’ This wasn’t the playful ‘well’ from I got from the girl before. This was an the ‘well’ of a woman who’s welcome I had overstayed the second I’d walked into the door.
Gloria didn’t much care for me. It hadn’t always been that way. When I first moved into the office next door, I met her in the elevator going down to lunch. It wasn’t long before we were going down to eat things that weren’t on any restaurant menu. I’m a bit of a klutz, however, and one night I guess I burned her ass one too many times with the curling iron (long story) and she told me she never wanted to see me again. Mistakenly, I assumed she meant she wanted me to blindfold her during sex. She didn’t.
‘I wonder what you can tell me about the woman who left that. I suspect she may be tied to a case I’m working on.’
‘HIPAA,’ Glori said.
‘Yes, they were nice,’ I said, ‘but what can you tell me about her?’
‘You idiot, HIPAA; not hips! Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It means I can’t discuss our patients with you or anyone else. I don’t think I can ever tell you whether she’s a woman or not.’
‘Oh, she’s a woman, all right.’ I said, perhaps with a little too much of a gleam in my eye.
‘Case, huh? I’ve seen that look before. Get out of my office, da Silva.’ As I started out the door, she called, ‘Hey, Lou’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t get her too near the toaster oven.’
Joearf’s Thoughts 