Sometimes manager’s don’t understand. When I was going to college in the late 90’s I had this incident with a manager.

I’m in the break room reading my Linguistic homework. The break  room was a good place to go because few people used it. Dave a manager came in and asked, “What are you reading now?” I answered, “My Linguistic reading.”

He asked, “What is linguistics and why study it?”

I answered, “It is the study of language. Right now I am reading about the English language. I think it is interesting to see how the English language has evolved.”

Dave shook his head and asked, “Why study it? What are you going to do with it?”

“It is learning something. for example, I didn’t know that English was part of the Germanic language. For example hair-English, haar-German, or have-English, haben-German, or hard-English, hart-German. Hear the similarities. Now let’s take it a bit further. This is Gothic, also Germanic, jah witandans wahtwom nahts ufaro hairdai seinai.”

“Same thing in Old English, hydras waeron on tham ylcan rice waciende, & nihtwaeccan healdende ofer heora heorda.”

Now Middle English, And schepherdis weren in the same cuntre, wakinge and hepinge the watchis of the nyzt on her fick.”

Low German, “Unde de herden weren in der suluen iegenode wakended. Unde helden de wake auer ere schape.”

Present day English, “And shepherds were in the same land abiding and keeping watch by night over their flocks.”

“Now if you notice it sounds the same or you can pick out words that sound similar. Now over the years English has had many influences from other European languages, until we have the English we speak today. Some people are trying to map all the languages to one starting language, in other words, did humans at one time speak one language. That is exciting, even if I only take this one course.”

Dave shook his head and said, “You are a weird person. If you concentrated on your job like you do on your interests, you would probably be a manager by now.” Dave left the break room and I can go back to my reading.

He was wrong about me not concentrating on my job. I did my job. I admit I didn’t play politics. I guess going to college wasn’t adding any points to improving myself.

I still read my books about all kinds of topics because I still like learning new things. Guess I’m still weird and I have no plans on changing.