A Lot of People Say, What's That?

[ciroccoj]

It's Pat.
A lot of people say, Who's he?
Or she.
A Ma'am or a Sir,
Accept him or her
For whatever it might be,
It's time for androgeny,
It's called Pat.

Anybody remember that little tune? Julia Sweeney on Saturday Night Live played Pat Riley, a sexually ambiguous character who drove everybody around... them... crazy trying to figure out what the heck they were.

Grammar whores: I was informed a while ago that it is becoming grammatically permissible to use the "singular they" to indicate "third person, gender unspecified." But then how do you conjugate the verb? It sounds odd to make it singular, but wrong to make it plural. ::sigh:: Can't we all just get along?

Anyway, Pat is the accompanyist for my grownup choir. I don't actually know their name. I assumed they were male - a tallish, rather unattractive pudgy man with stringy hair, a very bad pageboy cut, and a large face with small features - eg very small, closely set eyes that always look like they're squinting. They came in last week and were somewhat iffy on the notes, but I assumed that our regular accompanyist was out and Pat had been grabbed to fill in at the last moment.

Yesterday there they were again. And this time, they spoke several times, and the voice was... either a really, really high man's voice, or a relatively low woman's voice. And at one point I realized that what I had thought was five-o'clock shadow was just the shadows from the lights in the chapel. And that the pudginess... could actually include breasts.

So yeah. Pat.

Whatever their gender, Pat is not a lot of good as an accompanyist. They seem very nice and wel-intentioned, but they kept getting off tempo last night and totally screwing us up. The notes were more or less OK, but I don't think they looked up at our director even once. Made it a little tough to sing our African contrapuntal funky rhythm thang - as if singing in Zulu and Xhosa in multi-part changing tempo and odd solos and trying to rise past our non-African vanilla-ness wasn't hard enough, now we have Pat wandering about the melodies almost completely independent of the rest of us.

::sigh::

***
The kids and I were reading the Magic Treehouse Series this summer, where the books have names like Dinosaurs Before Dark and Night of the Ninja and Pirates Past Noon. I was reminded of that today, as I suffered through

• First The Ottawa Citizen called to tell me I still hadn't paid the bill for my mom's obituary. Nuts to that, said I, I've sent you two cheques already. What address are you at?
  
  They told me, and it sounded completely unlike the address on the invoice notice, so I asked if I could come in and pay in person and get a receipt this time. I'll also have to go look at my bank statements to see if anybody cashed either of the cheques - and if so, who.
  
  
• Then I had an appointment at the cemetery, where I was supposed to get a niche for my mom's urn. Everything had been settled beforehand, I just needed to come in for "fifteen, twenty minutes," said niche-dude. Which turned out to be 45 minutes, as he laboriously re-wrote everything out by hand and shuffled papers and misplaced stuff and generally fiddled about with his thumb up his bum.
  
  In all fairness to the guy, though, it looked like he was actually doing his best - just didn't have a lot of brain cells to rub together, so this was as good as he got.
  
  
• Got to the Ottawa Law Review training session 5 min late, because some yahoo on Laurier signalled left at two separate intersections, waited for cars to stop going past, holding everybody behind them up... and then appeared to realize at the last moment that no, actually, they meant to keep going straight. Twit.
  
  
• Training session. With a librarian who may be very competent as a librarian, but who knew next to nothing about legal citations. Which is fine, there's no reason why the librarian should know anything about legal citations... unless he's supposed to be teaching a class in it. Then a little knowledge would probably make the experience, oh, I don't know, USEFUL to the students.
  
  We basically watched him give us info from the McGill Guide (which, you know, we could probably READ or something, if we needed to figure something out) and flounder about most disturbingly whenever anybody asked him a question.
  
  "So, do we refer to the neutral citation if there is one, or do we still go to the reporter series?"
  "Um... well," (looking up 'neutral citation' in the index) "It says here... um... (scanning) ... uh, yeah, you use the - oh wait. No. No, it says you're supposed to go to the printed reporter series instead - oh, no, that's only when you're dealing with official reporters... uh... (scanning some more) ... I guess if it's not in an official reporter yet? Maybe?"
  "So if it's been printed in an official reporter we cite to that?"
  "Um... yeah."
  "What about online reporters?"
  "Oh, then... uh... (flips back to the index)..."
  
  Most frustrating. And what really got to me, after the first twenty minutes, wasn't even the library dude's lack of clue. It was my fellow assistant editor trainees, who insisted on ASKING HIM QUESTIONS during the whole painful 1:30 we were there. ARRG!!! I was so tempted, several times, to interrupt and say, "Will you give the guy a break? Can't you see he has absolutely no idea?!"
  
  Sometimes I wish I were more like Chris. Because that's what Chris would have done. Me, I just gritted my teeth and doodled in my notepad.

Heh. How you can tell when you haven't quite worked through the stress of the day: you sit down to lj and tap-tap-tap non-stop until it's all out. Don't know if anybody is going to read this whole diatribe against stupidity, but at least I'm feeling much better now :)

Comments

[umbo.livejournal.com]

I read the whole thing, and I'm glad you're feeling better now. Sounds like you had more than the average number of unhappy encounters with clueless people today--hopefully tomorrow will be better!

*hugs*

Oh, dear

[(Anonymous)]

I wish you had my hubby as a librarian. He's very good at those sessions. He even researches for each one - gasp.

Speaking of grammar whores - have you read "Eats, Shoots and LEaves"? It's a marvelous, light, punctuation book. Good light reading. Very witty.

Sarah

PS, I posted that link to Darby's question for you in the comments of that blog.

Re: Oh, dear

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

A couple of times during the training session I thought about putting in an indignant call to Rainer to inform him of what this nitwit was doing to his profession's reputation. Maybe seeing if Rainer could get on the phone with this dude and explain what being a 'professional' means.

Still not sure I should have resisted that impulse...

PS, I posted that link to Darby's question for you in the comments of that blog.

Thanks!

[officerjudy.livejournal.com]

First The Ottawa Citizen called to tell me I still hadn't paid the bill for my mom's obituary. Nuts to that, said I, I've sent you two cheques already. What address are you at?

This sounds like something that belongs in Tony Brown's column in the Citizen. (I think that's his name.) You know, the one where people complain about shoddy customer service?

I'm sorry for your loss, Cirocco.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

You know, the one where people complain about shoddy customer service?

Yeah. Oh, the irony ;)

I'm sorry for your loss, Cirocco.

Thanks.