Appendectomy

“This is much more civilized than a meeting room, don’t you think?” he says.

No, I don’t, actually. I would much prefer the safety of a poorly ventilated room that has a defined escape route; namely, the end of the meeting. But because I’m having lunch with a member of the executive leadership team, I do what you should always do when answering a question from someone with his own car park.

“Absolutely, Geoff,” I say, with a how lucky am I? grin. And then, because he’s grinning back at me, I get a rush of blood and try a bit of corporate humor. “I’ve always said the problem with meeting rooms is everybody has an agenda.”

He laughs. It seems genuine.

We’re building rapport!

A waitress appears. Geoff orders something I can’t pronounce, let alone visualize, and I go for my standard Margherita pizza.

“Margherita pizza?!” Geoff says, and for a moment I wonder if he’s going to start performance managing me. “This is a top-notch restaurant, Barney. Order something more exotic.”

“I like pizza.” I say this to the waitress while giving her my get out of here before we both lose our jobs eyes.

“Would you like a drink?” she asks.

Can’t you see my eyes, woman?!

“Just a Coke, for me,” Geoff says. “We’re in the public service.”

What?

“And you?” she says to me.

This is my chance to impress a man who has actually seen the inside of the CEO’s office. I activate my Italian accent, modelled primarily on Luigi Risotto, the belligerent restauranteur from The Simpsons. “I’ll have a chin-ar-toe.”

“A what?”

You’ve failed me, Luigi!

I point to the word “Chinotto.”

“It’s pronounced kin-otto,” the waitress, who is more Australian than the Sydney Harbour Bridge, informs me.

Geoff cringes. “Sorry about him. He can get a bit carried away.”

You told me to be more exotic!

The pizza is everything I had hoped for. Simple, predictable, edible. Geoff’s meal is a steaming pile of flavors and colors and spices and shells and Luigi knows what else atop a tangled disaster of pasta strands, each as thick as a stick of Big Red chewing gum.

Geoff puts his head over the meal and breathes it in like it’s an old-school cold-and-flu remedy. He’ll be ordering leeches next. “Oh, Barney, you have to try this,” he says through his first mouthful. And then he offers me his plate.

My appendix, until now a seemingly useless organ that has contributed nothing to my lifelong physical mediocrity, suddenly begins to ache. “Thanks, Geoff, but I’m alright with my pizza.”

“Go on. Try it, Barney. I insist.”

I don’t ask for much in life. I really don’t. I just like to order and eat my own meal. Is that too demanding? Is it too much that I don’t want to dip my fork into another man’s over-flavored saliva sample?

But Geoff seems to like me. And I want him to keep seeming to like me. So I have to act like I’m normal.

Come on, Barney, just until the end of lunch, just try to be normal. Try to be like everybody else. Try to be seemingly likeable.

I calculate which portion of the meal Geoff is least likely to have contaminated. My white blood cells paint their faces blue, William Wallace style. I make contact with the petri dish, somehow managing to get clean away with a single strand of Big Red looped around my fork. I might just make it out of here alive.

I start eating.

Or I might not.

My taste buds are in mutinous revolt. It’s like somebody emptied the contents of a storm drain onto what would otherwise have been a perfectly serviceable bowl of pasta. My gag reflex earns a pay raise. “Delicious,” I say.

Geoff nods at me like he’s my high school guidance counsellor. “See what happens when you just try something new. Now give me a sip of that Chinotto.”

My appendix bursts.