Once upon a time, I worked for in the office of a rather conservative, now defunct construction company in Medford, MA. I have a lot of stories about them, but this one's about the woman who I trained to take over for me as administrative assistant.

At the risk of sounding mean, she really had one of those hamster-wheel minds, where anything she had been taught becomes The Way It's Done for all eternity.

Well, we chatted, like officemates do, and one day we were talking about my Asian Studies degree. And she went on this long, chipper spiel about how Chinese people have "this book" that sits on a pedestal in their front room and it has all the hours of the day listed in it, and it tells them what they should be doing at any given hour.

To this day... I have absolutely no idea what the ever-living fuck she was talking about. And this story has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything that happened today, my previous rants, nor anything else.

I'm just still rabidly curious to this day WHAT THE BOUNCING CHRISTNUTS she had *actually* seen in those poor Asian folks' house—she was so generally uninformed I'd give about 1 in 5 odds they were even Chinese—and how the hell she managed to get this idea into her head.