Wednesday, March 2, 2011

2

His receptionist calls herself Miss Surely.  Like Cindy Sherman, her clothing, makeup and hairstyle change so regularly and radically, there’s no point describing her, and I’m not allowed to anyway.  No parody, no femme fatale, and no Moneypenny either, she's is a chameleonic study in the feminine standards of all eras, with a soothing, confident, maternal voice.  The kind you’d want to hear if you were lost.

When hairstyle permits, she wears an old-fashioned telephone operator’s headset on her head.  But usually, when the black, Bakelite, rotary dial telephone rings, she slips her iPad into her purse and places an easily destroyed, digitally untraceable recipe card on the otherwise bare desk before her.  By the 4th ring, she's unclipped her pendant pen from the chain around her neck, adjusted her cat eye reading glasses, and plucked the handset from its cradle.

"Good morning (or evening).  How may I help you?"

No comments:

Post a Comment