"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

So at the game yesterday, I get a call from the office, marking the 2nd time in my life someone has actually taken me up on the "KP-OOO: I'm out of the office today and returning tomorrow but please call my cell phone for any urgent matters" auto-reply on Outlook. The other incidence was at Opening Day last year. What that means, I don't know. Maybe that to my coworkers through the years, "baseball game" is synonymous with "lounging around with nothing to do but mentally outline the geometric shapes I see in the floor tiles." Honest mistake.*

Regardless, I take the call, leave my seat and go to the women's room by section 410 where it's much quieter. I could have taken the call in Kuwait, and it still would have been quieter than the stadium, as my coworker--who cares about sports about as much as I care about hammock repair in Eastern Mississippi--decided to call in the 9th inning of a tied game.

Today I see him and thank him for keeping me abreast of work matters that predictably enough could have waited til today, and let him know that I had no problem crawling down the tier with a "cranky" leg in the middle of an inning to talk shop.

"I will say that it handed me a pretty big laugh though, in retrospect. You know how when you go to girls' bathrooms--"

"No."

"Ok, well when chicks go to bathrooms, you ALWAYS overhear something akin to 'ok so what should I text him?' or 'Oh my God, do you we think we should say something to her about not talking to your boyfriend? because she's like really ugly and shit.'"

"Where is this going?"

"Ok, jerk. The point is, that when you called, I stood in a stall for 15 minutes and talked about work stuff, and then when I left I heard 2 girls saying, 'what the f*&^ was she talking about?' And they were looking at me kinda weird. And the other one says, 'I don't know, but I heard her say schizophrenia a lot, so...'"

Yeah, the account I work on is for a schizophrenia medication, and it never occured to me how weird this conversation would sound in public. I hope I have not been earmarked at GNH as someone who needs to be quarantined in a special section or something. This may very well be a legit course of action, but not for reasons of schizophrenia anyway.

My coworker, in a fantastic display of well-timed wit, counters, "You should have messed with them: 'What are you talking about, I wasn't even on the phone. Talking to someone, yes. But not on the phone...'"

Well-played, non-sports fan, well-played.

*I think it is, actually, an honest mistake. My coworkers are delights who genuinely wouldn't call during an off day if they thought I was doing something important. Next time I'm going to say I'm birthing a litter of puffins that day.