I often eat lunch in the break room with a book. (As an aside, sometimes it is a book I am actually reading; sometimes it is a book that I pull randomly off the shelf. Last week, one of these books was Bill Owens’ Suburbia. I’ll let you peruse that one yourself.) Equally as often, I heat my soup in the microwave. Because the breakroom is connected to the I.T. department’s office space (and one poor guy has to sit right next to the door, greeted by everyone’s lunch-y smells…blech I don’t know how he handles it), I try to stop the microwave right before the buzzer starts to go off (dealing with a spectrum of lunch aromas and an incessant microwave buzzer might make one irritable in my opinion). I should point out that I then take my soup to the table—without pressing the microwave’s clear button. I wouldn’t even notice that I don’t press the “clear” button if it weren’t for H. (see below). I just forget, I think. I don’t see the importance of it, and I have so many other things that I am always trying desperately to remember. So after I’ve heated my soup and am eating it, enjoying my random book of the day, I.T. worker H. will walk in and stand in the middle of the room like he is doing something important. (I used to think that he was filling a mug with coffee but have since realized that he enters and leaves the room with an empty mug. Interestingly, he holds this empty mug close to his chest; he never dangles it from a finger.) After spending a few moments moving back and forth in the middle of the breakroom, H. will walk swiftly back to the microwave in order to press the “clear” button. After he presses the “clear” button, he rushes out of the room. After months of this same scenario, I finally said “Oh, I’m sorry” in my sweetest voice and with my sweetest smile, just before he disappeared through the doorway. His response: “No problem. It happens all the time.”