Dinner with Kathleen

I had dinner a couple nights ago with a colleague from an office in Faraway City. I’ll call her Kathleen. She’s a Product Manager with a focus on the products we design in my home office. (I suppose I should say “the products we used to design there,” since we are being shut down.) A while ago – honestly, I don’t remember when or how – I apparently helped her find some data she needed for something. And ever since, she has been telling me, “The next time you’re in town, I owe you a coffee.” Well I was in town last week, as part of the Grand Tour I’m taking of our offices. And about the only time I had free during the whole visit was dinner one night. So we met for dinner. 

She wasn’t really buying my dinner, of course. I’m traveling for work, so I’m going to expense the meal. In fact, if we’d gone somewhere slightly cheaper I probably could have bought her dinner and passed it off as me being very hungry. The point was the meal itself. That we got to spend time away from the office just talking. 

In substance it was all unexceptionable. We were both animated in chatting, we told stories about who we are and where we’ve come from, ... in general the volume of words to food was pretty high. But there was nothing that I would overtly identify as flirting. No soft compliments sotto voce, no delicate pauses, no staring meaningfully into each other’s eyes. She mentioned her husband (once, when she talked about living “in my husband’s house but not with my parents”). I mentioned Wife (once, when she was essential for a story). So we each made a pro forma gesture in the direction of romantic unavailability, and to look at a transcript of the evening you would never find anything romantic in it. There wasn't anything. Open and shut.

Only ... as Plato and Aristotle could easily remind you, the world is composed of form as well as substance. And I couldn't help but notice tiny details of form -- tiny details, nothing more, but still:

• Since Kathleen didn't have the opportunity to buy me coffee, she bought be a bag of gourmet desserts that I could carry home with me. She made a point to add, "I hope no-one in your family is allergic to anything in these" ... and that surely distracted attention from the pink bag she handed them over in.
• After dinner was over, we spent the longest time standing in the cold wind in the parking lot before getting into our respective cars to drive away. I don't remember what we were discussing, and I'm sure that a transcript would have been very banal. Still. Standing in the cold wind in the parking lot instead of just saying "Good bye."
  
• She wore a thin, short skirt. It was dark so I might not even have noticed it except that we spent so long standing in the cold wind in the parking lot ... and the wind kept trying to lift her skirt so that she had to keep holding it down. The interplay between the wind and her hand caught my attention, so that I was able to see how light and thin the fabric was, and also how short the skirt was cut. Admittedly Kathleen isn't as tall as I am. But still, it was pretty short.
• She wore high heels -- delicate, pointy high heels, where the heel itself seemed no more than a needle. It was a bit of a hindrance when she had to cross the street between the restaurant and the parking lot. And she blamed the high heels on the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming to have been housebound for so many months that she was desperate for any excuse to wear "grown-up clothes." Still, I can't help thinking that for some dinner guests, "grown-up clothes" would have included shoes that were a bit more sensible than those ones.

 Does any of this mean anything? Not by itself, no. Wearing high heels does not ipso facto mean you are trying to flirt with anyone. And how often will I even see Kathleen in the future? She works in Faraway City. I work on the other side of the continent.

Oh ... wait ... I won't work there much longer, will I? We are closing that office. I am being given a chance to move to Sticksville, which isn't Faraway City -- but it is only one time zone away, and not three. So it's closer, for whatever that is worth.

On the subject of whether I should take up the offer to move, Kathleen said she would 100% understand and agree with my decision if I said No, because Sticksville is nowhere near as nice a place to live as Beautiful City (my home). Having said that, she went on to say that the transition the company will have to make (absorbing all the work we used to do) will be way more painful if I don't accept the offer. She explained this with reference to all the history that I carry in my head, all the questions I can answer ... that kind of thing. Nothing, not even her tone of voice, suggested that she meant any kind of personal reference at all. As I say, there was really nothing like that going on. But I did notice that she used the word painful instead of clumsy, cumbersome, awkward, or difficult. I don't really think that choice of words meant anything, but this whole post is an exercise in teasing out possible meanings that I don't really believe ... just because they are possible, and I've been wrong before. Maybe we'll see.