“You, umm, how do I say this? It’s always a rather awkward topic.”

I was sitting in the grayish office of The Woman Formerly Known as My Boss. When I had called to say I would be back in Frankfurt and available to work, Former Boss had called brimming with artificial niceties and the suggestion that we meet up for a “little chat” before I started working again.

I had wondered how bad it would be. “Little chat,” after all, is business speak for stern conversation about what you’ve done wrong. I was pretty sure I knew what was coming, so I just sat back with the relaxed smile of someone who’s just spent six months doing just exactly what she wants and watched her try to squirm her criticism out in a polite way. Too bad politeness so often gets in the way of honesty.

“Well, it’s about dress code,” she finally said, choosing her words slowly and running a finger across the edge of the plastic-gray table. “I’ve been cracking down on people about dress code lately.”

Uh-huh. Cracking down on “people.” Ladies and gentleman, I would like to introduce our new prototype. So polite! So kind! So diplomatic! An expert at talking around blame and unpleasantness! Some may call her an artificial coward but we call it state-of-the-art anti-unpleasantness. We’ve dubbed her the Modern Boss. Don’t wait! Place your orders today!

I personally would prefer conversations like this to be loud and honest. Maybe some yelling followed by a gladiator-style battle where we could bash our frustration and aggression out on each other with foam bats and go home friends. At least then we’d all know where we stood. Directness, after all, might lead to negative feelings and decreased productivity. It’s not personal. It’s never personal. It’s just business.

“You sometimes wore,” she went on, drawing out the “o” to buy time to search the database for more neutrally negative adjectives, “combinations that I was a little uncomfortable with.” Translation: You dress like a slob. There are sometimes holes in your pants. You don’t iron. I almost laughed. This had been coming for a long time. The only real surprise was that it had taken her so long to get around to it.

“You don’t have to wear a suit or anything,” she rushed on. “Just business casual. What you have on today is fine. You really don’t have to wear a suit, just because I do. I mean, I personally love suits.”

“Really?” I was incredulous. There can’t really be people who love suits, can there? Oh what people will do for fashion. Including looking like idiots, hookers, and penguins.

“Yeah. I really love them. And besides, I never know when I’ll have to meet a client.” I have never been good at determining when English people are being sincere and when they’re being ironic. Apparently I didn’t watch enough Monty Python as a kid. But doubt aside, I’m fairly sure I’ve never witnessed an authentic moment with this woman. Usually we exchange the banal forced small talk of office inmates and go our separate ways. Could this really be an authentic endorsement of the business suit? I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. She did, after all, meet her husband in church, and I have trouble taking people seriously who believe that a thousands-of-years-old slavery-endorsing pseudo-hippy is going to come back in a ball of fire and brimstone and lead us all to the promised land. I apologize to any Christians reading this. It’s just that we’re from different planets.

The worst of the criticism over, she went on in an attempt to lighten the mood. “Oh god,” she laughed. Her blue pants suit couldn’t manage a laugh and just hung sternly at her side. “I still remember that day you came in with the bruise on your neck from that chain you used wear. Oh my.” She shook her head in bewilderment at the memory.

The previous year I had almost always had the chain on. It was a heavy thick-linked number, fastened at the back with a safety pin. One day I had come into work and Former Boss had passed by with her usual pre-recorded pleasantries. But this time as her eyes wandered to my neck, a look of horror had spread across her face. “Nikki! Oh my god! You have a terrible bruise on your neck! What is that from? Oh my god, it’s from that chain! You shouldn’t sleep in that thing! You could suffocate!” Uh-huh. Suffocation. Neck bruise. Right.

Ever since she’s brought up the subject once every few months, as if she still can’t shake her horror at the thought. I nod and chuckle, wondering if she secretly thinks that bruise is part of some kinky asphixiation fetish.

I’ve never had the heart to tell her it was just dirt.

The best thing about teaching business executives English is that they’re usually too busy to actually attend entire lessons.

“Excuse me, I have to take this call,” the executive secretary tells me as she rushes out of the room. Later an accountant apologetically begs to end class fifteen minutes early and the Siemens executive sings “Traffic again!” at me as he arrives half an hour late for the fifteenth week in a row.

I sit at their dreary gray tables in their bland gray meeting rooms (the meeting rooms are always gray) and smile and nod. “Don’t worry about it,” I say. I’ve been daydreaming, I think. Or writing. Or reading. And you’ve been paying me for every minute. Come late, talk on the phone, don’t come at all! Because my students’ firms are paying the bills, it rarely occurs to them that they are throwing away almost a euro a minute on their phone calls and traffic jams.

When students need to leave early, they always try to break the news gently, as if I will be offended or angry with them for cutting the lesson short. “Nikki, we’re really sorry,” a delegate from one of my classes once told me gingerly. “But we have to end a half hour early today. There is an important meeting this afternoon, and we all need to be there. We’re really really sorry.” I almost laughed right in her face. Sorry?! I’m not! Have fun at your meeting! I’ll be laughing all the way to the park, where I’ll sit in the sun and drink beer with my friends, and get paid for it.

In the realm of private language schools the roles of “student” and “teacher” are becoming more and more irrelevant. This is not high school history class. There are no tests, no grades, and no detentions. You don’t need a hall pass, and no one is going to publicly humiliate you if you don’t do your homework. In part this is a positive step for education. More self-directed. More mature. But in part private language training skips over classic educational roles in favor of their capitalistic cousins. We are no longer student and teacher, we’re paying customer and service provider. And until my students notice, they’ll keep being too busy for class, and I’ll keep getting paid to take the afternoon off. It’s not a bad gig if you can stand the suits.

In America I have seen crazed shoppers with Mastercard eyes tear clothing from each other’s hands like rabid animals. Over-weight, over-paid women fighting each other for the privilege of buying $200 pants for $20. You’d think that killing someone over a price difference like that would be legal in America, but apparently the law hasn’t yet been passed. Working at the outlet sales, I’d always hoped I’d see a fist fight or someone pull a shotgun out of an over-sized designer handbag, but I never got to see so much as a bitch slap. Afraid of losing too much face, the customers would restrain themselves to backhanded insults and hateful glances.

Then I moved to Germany. Here, retail shopping is a blood sport.

Retail clerks, not actually obligated to wait on you, tend to treat customers much better than their waitress cousins. In retail stores, it’s not the employees you have to worry about, it’s the other customers. The clerks ignore the shoppers while the shoppers jostle each other out of the way, grab clothing from under each others’ noses, and cut each other in the dressing room lines every chance they get.

At first I thought I’d just had the bad luck of running into the rudest people in the country all in one day. Then it all happened again. And again. And again. And I started to think that maybe it was just normal. There’s certainly a distinct difference in regard for personal space here. That is, there is no regard for personal space. Try walking down a busy shopping street (like, for example, the Zeil in Frankfurt am Main). In America, it’d be considered impolite to jostle a clumsy shopper or a slow pedestrian. Many Germans would agree. But not the shoppers buzzing through Germany’s highly populated shopping districts. There jostling is not only normal, it’s expected, and, once you embrace it, a great way to take out aggression on a Saturday afternoon.

I once had a student who worked in high-end retail. Department stores, then designer jeans, then onto high-priced Italian luggage. He was sweet and witty and flamingly homosexual. We would commiserate about rude customers over cups of coffee and call it an English lesson. His name was Danny.

In German, he told me one morning, they don’t say that the customer is always right, they say that the customer is king. An appropriate metaphor seeing as “the customer” is almost never actually right and often behaves like a moody monarch on a power trip.

Once during his designer jeans days, a customer came in and demanded that Danny take back a pair of pants clearly marked nonreturnable. Danny told him that he was very very sorry, but that it wasn’t going to happen.

“I want to speak to the manager!” the customer shouted.

“I am the manager,” Danny replied calmly.

“But the customer is king!” came the arrogant response.

“Yes, and I’m the queen, and you’re not returning those pants.”

My worst nightmare probably involves some combination of hairy spiders, AIDS, and a brigade of machete-wielding circus clowns. But being trapped in a small room with a born again christian for three hours every day for a week might come in close second.

When I asked him what he did for a living, he told me he was “work free.” Sounded pretty good. Not wanting to ask if he had quit or been fired, I asked him what he wanted to do next. “Well, in the fall I will go to bible school. And then I will go to Egypt to teach people about Jesus.”

Uh-oh.  It’s not that I don’t like Jesus.  Maybe if he and I had met we would have really hit it off.  What with him preaching love and turning over the tables at the market and all.  It’s more like I don’t like extremist Christians telling me that I am, in fact, going to burn in eternal damnation.

“And what made you decide to do that?”

“It’s God’s will. He needs me in Egypt.”

Warning! Warning! Alien vessel at 6 o’clock. Keep him on the radar Scotty. We’ll try to make contact, but these fuckers are unpredictable, and I don’t want to risk an attack.

Sometimes teaching requires a level of diplomacy I never knew I was capable of.

For the first hour, it was easy to keep the conversation to less potentially explosive subjects. What do you NEED to use English for? What do you LIKE DOING in your free time.” The usual blah blah blah small talk stuff that turns English teachers into therapists and intensive training courses, at worst, into nightmares.

“What WOULD you do IF an elephant walked into the room right now?”

“If an elephant walked into the room right now, I would sit on him.”

“Would you sit on him?  Or would you ride him?”

“Oh yes, ride him. Into the city.”

A student with a bit of an imagination is a language teacher’s best friend. Especially considering I’ve already asked this question at least fifteen times this week.

“What WOULD happen, IF you didn’t eat for a week?”

“I would be very happy.”

Well that’s a new one. He’s a normal sized guy, so despite a slight fear of an impending “well I throw up all my food anyways” response, I abandon tact and ask why.

He pauses, folding his hands. “When I first find my faith, I not eat for 23 days.”

“When you first FOUND your faith, you DIDN’T eat for 23 days?”

“Yes, I didn’t eat for 23 days. I was very happy.”

Ok. I suppose I can understand that. I hear fasting can have that effect. Besides, he tells me, you’re only hungry for the first two or three days.

But it wasn’t until we got to “might” that the real trouble started. Since he’s not working, I skip over the “Do you think we’ll have a meeting tomorrow? Well, we might…” prompts and start asking him what he thinks might happen with transportation/fashion/government/the environment in the year 2100.

“I think we might have flying cars.”

“I think we might have better health care.”

So far, so good.

Then, almost at the bottom of the prompt list, “What do you think MIGHT happen with family structures? Marriage, divorce, children, that sort of thing,” I ask.

“Well, I think they might be righter.”

Scotty, we’re going to have to raise that alert from orange to red.

Where do you begin correcting a sentence that has thrown both tact and grammar to the wind? With the grammatical structure? With the subjectivity of a right or a wrong when it comes to family structures? Teach him how to say “In accordance with Christian beliefs”? It was obvious where this was going, but I thought, hell, his English isn’t that great, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

“What do you mean exactly by ‘righter’?” I ask, thanking my lucky stars that Jesus needed him in Egypt and not in my English class for the next six months.

“Righter. For example, homosexual marriage is wrong. I think in the year 2100, it might be righter.”

Damn it Ensen, it doesn’t look like there’s going to be an opportunity for peaceful contact. Scotty! Launch the missiles, we’re under attack.