alias_sqbr

In today's team meeting when we were talking about the upcoming week, my boss (gently!) made fun of me for not realizing that next Friday is a bank holiday -- the other day when I was talking to someone about a thing that had to be rearranged from another day next week, they suggested Friday so I told my manager she could do Friday and he had to tell me Friday's the bank holiday.

To add to the making fun of me, I said it was extra bad of me to not know this because it's D's and my anniversary. That made my manager properly laugh, heh.

Then he asked "How many years?" and I just made an "oh god..." kind of noise, which sounds suitably middle-aged like who's even counting any more. But really all it means is that the long run-up of being good friends makes it feel like we've been together longer than the technical answer (seven years now). I will always treasure the memory of when we'd been dating only like three months, getting a train home at night, a young woman who needed help gravitated toward the table we were sitting at and we got chatting. She asked where my accent was from and I told her and we talked about that, she looked at D and asked him if he'd ever gone with me, and he said "not yet!" (which was true, it'd be another four years before he did!). She'd clearly been assuming that we'd been a couple for ages, and I don't blame her at all because I do think we gave off that vibe. So then she asked how long we'd been together. And I was delighted by D's casual answer, "a few years," splitting the difference between the technical reality of three months or so, and the vibe of people who'd been close for more than a decade.

I tried to channel that spirit to answer my manager's question, split the difference, especially when he added "estimate!" I think I said "fifteen?", dragged out to have about fifteen e's in it, and as many question marks at the end.