12 hours of Education

I came to the conclusion this week that you can learn a lot in conversation by working twelve hour days. It's actually hard to stand next to someone and not talk for any length of time. A good conversation can make the time go by a little faster. But you have to engage in a conversation with those who can actually talk and work at the same time, not someone who pauses and holds you up while gabbing away. Of course at 5am the conversation starts out light as everyone's tired. By mid-afternoon it turns silly as everyone's overtired. Today we learned all about mong's. There are only 18 different last names in the Mong culture. (I retained that). We also learned that they have no real land. This was learned when we were bored of trivial conversation such as "What'd you do last night, and "Hey, it's supposed to snow tomorrow".
There was about an hour long topic on our mothers. Some good, some bad. I guess I really appreciate my mother now. The silly one was calling the maintenance guy Don Juan and seeing the blank look on his face. He had never heard of Don, and was persistant I tell him who he was. The reason we called him this is that he is always hanging around the ladies. The problem is if you want something fixed you have to get him away from the most recent one he's talking to. So I told him to go look up Don and see what he found. 1/2 hour later he returns and recites this whole little story. I think he may have gotten the picture.
There was some bodily functions topics in there and a little conversation about vibrating slippers and the Happy Feet commercial. There was a great idea for manufacturing steel-toed slippers so one's feet would never hurt while standing all day.
The best topic (or it seemed so at the time) was about falling on the ice when walking thru the parking lot. A few years ago we had a girl who fell and was out of work for a week or so. Since this incident our company has come up with a policy for winter parking and safe walking through the parking lot. We make light of it sometimes by warning everyone to walk safe. It is a serious subject, but very repetitive at times. We ended up with a saga of not seeing each other spralled out on the ground and one by one running each other over. We figured they'd be all up in arms on who to give the 3 day suspensions to. Seems like a lot to go through to get a day or two off.
I'm working with the same people tomorrow, so I can only hope that one of us has something of some interest to talk about that will make the time go a little faster.
In the meantime I'm going to rest my aching, sore feet.