Nick makes his way up the stairs to the English department with his best draft in hand, printed on dot matrix in some kind of Serif font. In earlier days he would venture over to the Apple II lab in the library, but eventually made the tech building's PC lab his regular haunt once Steve Collins had gotten him familiar with the DOS world. It was mostly the PS/2 Models 25 and 30, slower than his beast at home but with hard drives full of games that fit many times on a floppy.
There's no one at the reception desk so he looks around, winds back through a hallway and finds Noreen slumped over a desk in the corner somewhere beneath a blond mop. She looks up at him and cocks her head sideways. She gets up and does a stiff-legged shuffle of sorts, while making a dimple face, proceeds past him and grabs his paper. He follows her to a small conference room with windows. She points at the further chair and grunts. He hesitates, so she grunts a bit louder. He complies.
She plops in the other chair then shuffles through the pages, making a hom-hom-hom noise and bobbing her head back and forth. She then sets them back down and pulls her hair back, then lets it fall, then proceeds to read the text while whispering. At random intervals there's a surprised AWWWW or gasped OH or even a tsk-tsk-tsk. All this time her head has lowered to where her hair is completely covering the pages.
"You're getting hair on my printout," he observes.
She looks up for a second then waves a finger, making sci fi-alien-like sounds. Flips the page. Then there's this almost ghastly evil grin emerging from beneath the hair, more clicky-alien sounds and her head shakes. She pulls a magnifying glass out of a front pocket and appears to be looking at a pixel-level.
At some point she sits up, head to one side, wide eyed, draws a breath, and makes a mark.
In her normal voice, "Are you familiar with an Oxford comma?"
"Never been to Oxford."
"Look it up."
And then, she turns sideways, crosses her legs and puts the remaining pages on her lap, and twiddles her famous red pen.
"Are you even reading that?"
She leans toward him, extends her index finger upward just a few inches away from his face, "That's ONE. Two's the clinch." And then continues as she had.
After a page or two she leans an elbow on the table and continues on, marks something, then goes into what can only be described as mumbled ohh no mister bill bit from SNL.
Eventually she turns towards him, "OK, now granted I'm no expert on the subject matter -"
"You mean programming VCRs?"
She pauses, leans in, and motions him to lean a bit closer. She makes a number two with her outstretched hand, then quickly uses them to grab his nose.
In an understandably nasal voice, he queries, "Are we in a conflict of interest yet?"
She lets go. "The only thing you need to worry about in life is THIS," grins maniacally, raises one brow, and waves the red pen for a few seconds, squares herself in the chair and continues. "Is there enough detail in this section here, regarding your process for building -wait, how about, testing the prototype?"
"There's some things I could add."
"Such as?"
"Well, there were some additional steps I could piece together, I suppose they are relevant."
"See that you do." and then writes some notes in the margins.
She brings a foot onto her chair, rests the right arm with the right hand with the pen on one knee and keeps twirling, then makes wide eyes, snarls, sticks her tongue out to one side, and sneezes into her elbow.
"Gesundheit!" Nick offers.
She just gives a cold stare while resuming her gaze at the pages, which are now fewer to go.
Nick really wishes he had to fart at this point, but no such luck. Even a peeper would do. He tries reaching for the magnifying glass but gets met by the red pen being held at him as a knife, she starts to growl and snarl. He slowly withdraws. There's no winning here. His next move would just be to tap fingers or hambone, forget it.
He turns and looks out the window behind him. It was strange, after all those years growing up and coming to the campus while on a drive or to take trail walks, to have this viewpoint.
She draws a deep breath and he turns back her way, and she seems to be just now staring down at the paper as if to set it on fire by will.
"Find anything good?"
Noreen just shakes her head and keeps shaking it for a good minute or so. He can hear her foot bobbing beneath the table.
He gets up to stretch his legs.
"Sit." she commands.
He looks her way, she stares him down and gradually rises with a menacing look. He shrugs and sits.
Eventually she turns over the last paper and writes some notes, puts the pages back in order, shuffles them on the desktop, and stands up. She slowly walks over to him and offers her hand. She pulls to get him to his feet, leans in and lightly pecks his cheek, whispers "Very nice work," then slaps the pages against his chest, and walks away, slowly, slouching, as a weary, defeated child.
Nick takes one more look out the window, sighs, and heads out.
*****
It's a work-free Thursday evening ahead at home. He eats supper downstairs for once and mentions the paper review, tries to describe her antics, how she got the whole lab into a Monty Python frenzy, and Irene was able to get hints that they talk sometime.
"She sounds interesting, honey, you just may have met your match this time," she offers with a grin.
The comments written on his draft were purely clinical, as expected, but not without merit. In fact, he has to think he would have asked her to take a look even if it weren't officially arranged. He had usually had his mom proof things up through high school but not so much after that, she said it was just too technical or above her pay grade. Ned would breeze through and pick out the technical but wouldn’t evaluate the grammar at all.
So he powers up his Model 50, finds the floppy with the file and goes at it.
Later on, after diddidahs on the big fancy radio and TNG he slips downstairs to tape Flying Circus off the public TV out of Decatur, it's time to up the Python game. Tonight it happens to be the Whickers' Island where they all act like a nasally-voiced, hypnotically droning interviewer named Whicker. This spawns an irresistible plot.
You ain't seen nuthin' yet, lady.