Daily Blague

When the lesson was over, I went downstairs with the prof; I would say goodbye to him at his floor, and then proceed to the first floor to get the mail. Before we got very far, however, the elevator stopped and a woman boarded with one of the building's newish brass luggage carts that. These baroque jobs are much more handsome than the scruffy ones that we used to have, but they take up much more room. In theory, they're not to be taken onto the passenger elevators, but the service elevator is often tied up with garbage runs and other maintenance tasks, and, as the woman would later say, she had been waiting for it for fifteen minutes. There was some hesitation about the woman's getting on, because I had to get out of her way, and I wasn't sure that I ought to - without really thinking, I could foresee problems for the prof. So could he, I'm sure. But gallantry trumped wisdom. Once the woman rolled the cart in, the prof was pinned in a corner. It was explained that the prof would have to get off before the first floor. The woman blithely replied that he could hop onto the cart and off the other side. She seemed to think that this was a perfectly acceptable remark to make to a sixty year-old gentleman, and I bristled at her casual outlook. I bristled so much that I spoke up, rashly. "I'm sorry," I said, "but the gentleman has a bad knee." Well, I'd picked the wrong person to share this information with, because the woman promptly announced herself to be a massage therapist who sees plenty of bad knees, and what's your trouble? The prof had to explain the situation further, lest the woman think that he was not taking care of himself. The elevator stopped again, and some more people got on. The prof said that he would go down to the first floor and then come back up. (Bear in mind that he was not enjoying standing up.) I felt awful when the elevator stopped at his floor, and not only did the prof not get off - the entire cab would have had to exit first - but somebody actually squeezed on, and with a little dog, too. I should have made a fuss, but I knew that the prof wouldn't have liked that; I'd already caused enough trouble. Besides, I might not have been heard, for the therapist had taken on the prof as a patient, at least insofar as she allowed herself to give him advice in a regular speaking voice, not in the discreet whisper that would have made her officiousness tolerable. It was all quite miserably impertinent, and I regretted my role in making it possible. Physical therapists are necessarily helpful people, but the woman in the elevator had lost sight of the line between the helpful and the intrusive. In a city where there are eight million such anecdotes a day, staying clear of that line is one of the first rules of public conduct....

("You see, hon? Here's a guy in New York itself who says it's important to be rude and unfriendly there.")