So I've had really good luck with bosses in my... let's be overly generous and call it a "career." Even at the soul-sucking law firm job, my boss left me alone to do my work and wished me well when I quit. Anyway, luckily enough, this trend has continued at the tutoring center, and the woman who oversees all the humanities tutoring (including writing and philosophy) is really sweet. Almost too sweet -- she gives lip service to being all strict on the "no walk-ins" policy, but she won't actually turn anyone away, even if it means triple booking us or consulting with a student herself. She's so laid back I sometimes want to sniff her ever-present Dr Pepper can to see if there's more than just Dr Pepper in there.*
Anyway, she'd stopped by the writing room on Thursday during a slow moment. I was working with a guy who, in addition to being a Very Serious Poet and amateur astrologist and possibly-self-appointed psychic, is a vegan. (We're best pals, me and this dude.)(Nah, he's not bad, I just find him endlessly amusing.) So we were talking about what snacks my boss was going make for the training session on Friday. She was planning on making pigs-in-a-blanket, which are obviously not vegan-friendly, but she was going to try wrapping them in phyllo dough. That led to a discussion on whether phyllo was vegan, or crescent roll dough was vegan, would he just eat the blanket but not the pig, etc. (There's a point to this, I swear.)
So my boss shows up to the training session with a platter of pigs in two varieties of blanket -- crescent rolls on the right, phyllo dough on the left. I picked up one of each, though the "phyllo" blanket looked suspiciously like a cocktail napkin. I sat with my fellow writing tutors, who had all gotten the same things and were carefully pondering them. It didn't quite look like what we thought phyllo looked like, but the edges were browned and had obviously been baked with cheese and a little cocktail weenie inside, and surely it couldn't actually be a napkin.
I took a bite. It was actually a napkin.
So nobody said anything to her, because what the hell do you say when your boss is kind enough to make you food that does not actually turn out to be food? Compounding the mystery, at the bottom of the platter were some pigs-in-blankets made with actual phyllo dough, which, in case you were wondering, looks significantly different from a singed paper napkin. So we were left to ponder... what the hell? Logic dictates that the ones on the bottom were made first, so at some point she switched from dough to napkin without realizing it. She always wears glasses around her neck for reading, so it could have been a sight issue. But probably not. I'm just wondering at what point in the bottle of wine/cooking sherry/Jack Daniels do cocktail napkins become indistinguishable from phyllo. If anyone wants to experiment on that and get back to me, we could probably co-author a paper.
*(There's no period after the Dr -- look it up.)