Eavesdropping on underwriting

I got to work a little late this morning, which I attribute to the fact that I went to bed a few minutes before 4am. I was barely sitting when I started to hear snippets of the conversation from the underwriting department. I guess I got to work just in time to hear Andrew announce that when he starts to go bald he's going to get hair implants so that he can cover up his ears that stick out. Weird...last I checked his hair isn't currently covering his ears, so I have no idea what kind of logic was at play there. I'm not sure if I was not all the way awake or what, but the next thing I heard was Phyllis talking about her daughters hair that was several feet long when she chopped it off. Andrew immediately asks "did she donate it to a charity?" I bet she would have made a ton of money.

Andrew was really on a roll today, later in the afternoon I was privy to his conversation with his mother about how he and Shasta are having relationship problems. They're trying to work it out. I guess they're living together now. Additionally she was laid off at her previous job, and then came to work here, but quit after only a couple of weeks so that her old job could hire her back, but they've just laid her off again. I've never even heard of such a thing happening before.

After he got off the phone Philip randomly starting relating some story about the swimming coach at his high school, who installed hidden cameras in the girl's locker room. I was actually surprised at the outrage that was immediately generated in Andrew. He got so worked up about it that he was practically shouting. I had to step away from my desk for a few minutes and by the time I got back the conversation had taken a whole new turn, and they were discussing *** ****. The two of them were practically talking over the top of each other trying to tell their stories (that's right, plural) of how they were subjected to that material via spam. Somewhere in there I started to suspect that they were just trying to one up each other. They each felt some need to provide a detailed description of what was depicted in the pictures, while the other one gave some kind of obligatory exclamation of disgust before he could launch into his next story. I can't fathom how anyone could have had the misfortune of "accidentally" opening up that many spam messages. I turned on my ipod, so I have no idea how that conversation ended.

**** was also a topic of indepth conversation last week. Phyllis started it off by talking about how concerned she is that when she paid for her son to go to a strip joint he turned it down, and when she hired a bellydancer for his birthday he was weirded out and refused to stick dollar bills in her clothes...so Phyllis stepped up to the plate and did it for him. Andrew piped up that he feels that **** and strip joints are kind of weird, and he doesn't understand the point since he can always just go home to Shasta, and well anyway, tmi. Phyllis also announced that her daughter has already made the decision that should Playboy ever ask her to pose, she won't do it. Steve was away from his desk so I fired off an e-mail to bring him up to speed:

Me: "You missed out on all kinds of interesting conversation. Phyllis can't figure out what's wrong with her son who was creeped out by the fact that she hired a bellydancer for his birthday, and then wanted him to stick dollar bills in her costume. She's also tried to pay him to go to a strip joint and he won't go."

"She's not worried about her daughter ever posing for playboy because her grandfather looks at playboy, and she'd never want him to spot her in there."

Steve: "Her daughter got some sort of job modeling. It's just one photo shoot, I think. But you'd never know that from how Phyllis talked about it. I think any worries that she could potentially have about Playboy calling are severely premature. "

"Phyllis is probably one of those weird mothers who worries that their son is gay and wants him to prove he's not."