Well, bless you!

My office mate is from Taiwan. My office mate asks me the most random questions at the most random times – even when I am using the international signal for “I am extremely focused on my work” (i.e. wearing headphones while frantically typing into my laptop with several open books/stacks of papers on the table).

The two of us have the desks at the window and there’s a huge bookshelf between us. Yes it’s possible to have a conversation “through” it, but due to my office mate’s limited English (it’s getting better though!) he usually does this thing where he pushes his chair backwards, and says: “Shay-non, I have question”. This question can be anything ranging from some announcement our department has made (not so random you think,… but wait!) to “Shay-non, I hear German and English very similar language” (I made the mistake digging back into my knowledge of the development and history of various European languages which has encouraged him to use me as an Encyclopedia) to “Shay-non, I hear in German (he never says Germany) students don’t pay for lense” (it took me a while to figure out he has an odd obsession with the fact that Germans make the best lenses for glasses), he also tried to rope me into discussions about the German welfare system, the fact that I play rugby not football etc.

One day, he asked me a question that apparently has been sitting on this chest for a long time and had come up again at a recent event, where he sneezed in the library and somebody said “bless you”. It turns out that he has noticed this before and was a bit confused of how it actually “works”. I spent about 20 minutes explaining the convention and answering his many questions. Like do you only say it to people you know, if there are other people in the room who says bless you, etc. Just goes to show you how complicated small every day things like that can be for an outsider.

Ironically, this happened on a day when I was having really, really bad allergies. I had spent the first half of the morning working from our kitchen table with a roll of toilette paper at hand and had only come into school because I needed to get at the internal network. Even as I was explaining the whole “issue” I was thinking to myself… this is not going to go well!

Sure enough, not even two minutes after our conversation, my nose started itching and I sniffled a bit. I heard and excited: “Shay-non! I say BLESS now?” which resulted in another 10 minutes of explaining how you only use it for people who sneeze. Then my allergies kicked in again for real. The kind where I sneeze so much and in so rapid succession that I’m sore the next day.

And every time I sneezed there’d be a super excited: “BLESS! BLESS! Shay-non, I say it right now?”

Needless to say I left early that day…