| Hiring Employees in Casco Viejo, Panama |
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| Saturday, 18 August 2007 09:15 |
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Just the other day, we here at Los Cuatro Tulipanes realized
the need for an additional employee and Keenan, with his ever-increasing vocabulary,
adopted the task of informing our current favorite Elida hoping that someone with
her hard work ethic would surely have similarly-qualified friends.
Keenan and Elida have developed their own sort of language: a dialect founded on the principles that if you are not able to communicate with someone else, you might as well make stuff up. What results is this haphazard mix of Spanish, English and hand signals that would probably have my sixth grade tutor Senora Russel, rolling in her grave.
There are times, numerous times, when the obstacles impeding their communication are too big to jump over. Times when their invented language is just not quite enough.
"You Elida" Keenan said. "You Elida can know a friend at home to work?" He has a way of finishing slapdash sentences with the kind of inflection that clearly signifies a question. But unfortunately there's no way to know what he's asking.
Elida looked puzzled but nonetheless willing to do whatever it was Keenan was trying to convey.
"When you Elida are...outside...your friend come to work inside."
At this point, not even I had any idea what Keenan was trying to say. He had wound himself, as he so often does, into this linguistic hole above which he'd probably be better off saying nothing at all. Now Elida was had to take into account friends, work, both indoors and out.
"You Elida, have friend work here, when you...oh crap." I stepped in to help Keenan out as he was clearly attempting to commit some sort of lingual suicide. I explained that he was inquiring as to whether you might have a friend who could help out on your days off. "Oh sure" Elida responded. "Why didn't you say so?" |
