People Watching

I think those little booties that workmen (or women) wear to come into your house are ridiculous. I mean I know that there are people who don’t want any trace of the outdoors in their house. My Aunt Ila would have been one of those. I just happen to find them ridiculous. I mean every time the person has to come in and out of your house they have to take them off and put them back on again. If that were me, I’d be totally irritated.

I actually really don’t mind having workmen (or women, you get the point, I only have 365 words here) in our house. I think it appeals to the voyeur side of me. It gives me a chance to interact with people that I probably would never meet otherwise. My world is pretty kid-centric, so I rarely hang out with people that I don’t already know who don’t have kids. So the workmen who come to our house usually appear to be outside of my normal realm of interaction.

Like yesterday, the people who came to clean our ducts, one of them was probably about my age, seemingly married but didn’t interact with my kiddos at all, which usually means he doesn’t have any kids of his own. Another was a spunky woman who was so little I thought maybe they’d send her into the vents instead of the hoses. The last was a younger guy, probably late teens/early 20’s who must have been new to the job and didn’t say one word to me, but kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

They were all so extraordinarily nice. And they were here for 5 ½ hours. So we chatted a bit and I got to watch them work together. It was a nice window into someone else’s life for a few hours. It was cool to watch the supervisor teach the other two as they went along, to see him pass along information he had obviously studied for quite some time. And fun to listen to them give each other shit and mess around.

I love it when people watching opportunities come to me.