Recently, I came across a MANSPEC (whatever that was) report from December 1997. It is subtitled 'Information Systems Risk Management'. A Master of Science certificate in Information Systems Management informs me this was awarded in February 1998, from I suppose, the exams the previous summer. So I must have moved into my second job in a tech company in the spring of 1998, meaning this report may be part of a recruitment process for the many jobs I applied for at this time. It is typed in a font like Courier, making it look even duller than it is. I have no recollection of reading it at the time and have not read it all yet. It is some kind of personality assessment. A final paragraph reads:
Her strong tendency to seek and enjoy the company of others will give her an attractive warmth in those elements of her work which involve the managing of staff or handling interpersonal relationships beyond the boundary of her sphere of immediate influence, but could conceivably lead her on occasion to spend too much time socialising when she should be pursuing the rask, unless she is also a a very task centered individual.
It is true that in the milongas, I chat, endlessly. It is a long standing trait. At university, waitressing in a local restaurant I would chat with the customers, which was good for business, up to a point. "It's good to talk" my smart, Italian boss would say, wryly, quoting the BT advert of the time.
A few days after a milonga I was telling a new Peruvian friend that I had met, recently, a Colombian and a Dominicano. The Colombian was the strong silent type while the Dominican was lively, a dancer, a non-stop chatterbox.
Los Cubanos y los dominicans...."mucha lengua", he said, meaningfully.
Oh, I've heard that before - mucha labia - but I can't remember if it it was in Spanish or Italian.
It's Spanish, he clarified.
Hmmm, he added, clearly intending an Ojo! warning about Dominicans.
I was chatting with the two men in an area outside the milonga. They had dropped in to meet me to say hello and talk about music. A woman, an apparently good dancer I have never danced with came by wanting to enter the conversation. Extraordinarily, she looked at me, for clarification or confirmation, several times during the chat. This is the power of the door of the milonga. It would never have happened inside that door. We have our established code: we don't dance together, therefore we don't look at one another But outside the door, magical, transformative things happen. And how strange that they are magical, because it is outside the door that we are back in reality. Well, one reality.
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