ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

My boss and I have started taking a half hour walk together sometimes at lunch time. It is interesting because she is always so busy that even though I have been there since November, I have hardly spent any time having leisure conversations with her at all. So even though she is a very nice lady, I feel bad taking up her time because she always has tons of stuff going on. I guess I would say that she is a lot more important to our organization than my old boss was to my old employer, so for that reason her time is at a real premium and lots of people want to talk with her.

When I first started, she invited me to walk with her and the payroll lady a couple of times, but at the time I was working out pretty regularly at home, and wanted to take a quick little lunch so I could go home sooner. Then the payroll lady got a puppy and she has been running home to let him out on her lunch hour, so my boss had nobody to walk with. I thought it would be nice to offer to walk with her, so she wouldn’t have to be alone, and also I got a pedometer recently and have been trying to walk around more in general. We started last week.

Anyway, it has been interesting because I have hardly gotten to know her, and I’ve now spent more time with her in the last week than I probably did over the past three months. Yesterday we had this extremely delightful conversation. I was explaining how we were choosing a wedding date, and how we were picking between August 1 and August 8, more or less (I think we’re tentatively settled on the 8th at this point) and she became excited because “if you do it on that Friday it will be Eight-eight of oh-eight!” I gasped with surprise, because for some reason although I’d been excited last year about buying my car on 7/7/07, I hadn’t even thought about getting married on 8/8/08. Now that I consider it, I think my coworker friend was trying to tell me this the other day and I didn’t understand.

“Eight and eighteen have always been a couple of my very favorite numbers,” she told me.

I love it that my boss has a favorite number. We discussed the “feel” of different numbers, and because I suddenly sensed a kindred spirit, I told her about how when I was little, I always pretended that numbers 1-9 were members of a family, and multiples of these numbers were various family outings or gatherings. I don’t remember exactly how it all went, but 9 was the dad and 7 was the goofy uncle and 8 was the mom and 6 was the biggest sister and 3 was a little brother on like that. I think I may have expanded it a little, to where 10 was the grandmother and 11 was a grandfather. So 7 x 3 = 63 was the uncle taking the little boy to the zoo or something, and 9 x 8 = 72 was the mother and father going to dinner without the kids. Squares usually meant that the person was doing something alone, like 81 and 64 were the parents going to work, and 36 was the sister doing homework in her room.

I explained all this to her. She nodded in agreement. “I always thought evens were girls and odds were boys,” she said.

“Oh, definitely,” I said. “Two is a very feminine number.”

I couldn’t say why I thought this, but it was nice to talk to someone else who also knew that this was true.

Maybe it’s part of why we became accountants.