Elevators....

Elevator conversations are always interesting ones. If you're the one having it, it often involves veiled attempts to conceal the true meaning of the conversation in order to obscure it from the others standing in the 5 foot square box as you travel from floor to floor. If you are the one on the outside of the conversation you do one of two things.
Ignore it - the harder of the two options.
Or - Try to inconspicuously figure out what the others are talking about, while hiding your smile when you make the connection so that they don't know that you have understood what they were talking about. (this is particularly fun when another language is being spoken)

Don't know about you, but I'm the curious type and often fall into the second category - partly because - I've been in the uncomfortable position when trying the first option and having someone ask me a question - and I'm not paying attention - but it truth be told, mostly because I'm a bit nosy!

But then there are the conversations that are not actually conversations but jokes that the punch line is spoiled when one person gets off the elevator. This morning I came to work to hear "You gotta here this joke... Ok... so there was this guru standing in the middle of a desert, he was older, and his skin was leathery from all of the exposure to the sun. The wind was whipping around him, picking up sand as it swirled up and all around him. You could just see his face, then all of a sudden the wind stopped and you saw him standing there naked, except for his really long hair...." then they got off the elevator. I'll never know the end of that joke (and I'm sorry to say that neither will you!). But it is interesting - we see and hear snippets of things all day long. Sometimes we talk plainly, but more often it is in veiled tones, innuendos, jokes or analogies. It's frustrating when we don't get to hear the end of the story, but more often than not - you learn less from plain speaking than more epxressive, analogies and poetic forms!