Mr T and sympathy

I've just noticed that there's a guy going round the Keystone campus today who looks like a thin version of Mr T. (Note that I took a photo of a photo of the real Mr T, so hopefully this will avoid any copyright infringement.)

I had one of those awkward, yet surreal moments yesterday on the way into work. Rounding the final corner of my commute, and coming into the last few hundred metres before I arrived at Keystone, I saw Kadiva, the cleaner, in the road ahead of me. She had seen me and stopped to wait for me. "How friendly!" I thought, pleased at human nature and life in general as I walked up and greeted her. However, no sooner had I uttered a cheery "Morning!" then I suddenly remembered that her English was as good as my Tamil, thus creating a communication problem.

The walk of the last few hundred metres seemed to take forever as we made awkward sign language coversation, presumably each referring to completely different things and having no idea what the other one was on about. Me (gesturing at the sky): "Looks like rain today". Her (seeing my sky gesture): "Yes, it's a fairly common bird for round here, that one. It's called the Blue Jay Z". Me (pointing at her, then the gate ahead): "You work Keystone every day?" (in the English way of losing all grammatical accuracy when speaking to a foreigner). Her: "Yes, of course I work at Keystone, I go there every day as you know. I'm on my way there now, as are you. Are you mental or wot?".

Then the cherry on top of our cake of awkwardness: inspired, I realised we could introduce ourselves. I patted my chest and said "Me Mike" (idiot, now I sound like flamin' Tarzan). As I pointed towards her inquiringly, she grabbed my outstretched hand and, mistaking it for an offer of a handshake, then shook it awkwardly whilst we were still walking along. (Shaking hands whilst walking is tricky at the best of times - try it next time you and a friend are really, really bored.)

And it got worse. Today she came round to do some cleaning at my house before work, so we had to walk in to work together, for twenty minutes. We just gave up and lapsed into an awakward mutual silence....