The Daily Procrastinator

I have, in the past, been accused of being quiet. When I worked at a dotcom in 2000, my boss referred to me as “the tall, quiet girl.” When I moved to a tech company in 2001, my then-manager worried that she might have hired a librarian. This is less the case now. Ever since leaving corporate America to become a full-time writer, I’m left with a certain conversational void in my life, a void that I’m largely unaware of until I get into a social situation and discover that I’m the overly chatty person who has inadvertently cornered someone and talked their ear off.

But this story is about back then. So there I was, giving all appearances of being a quiet bookworm. I had lived in the same place for about five years and had become good friends with the couple who lived next door. And then, in January 2005, I took a week-long cruise where I was unreachable. I returned to discover that my place had been completely ransacked over the course of seven days, leaving me with little more than some clothing and furniture scattered in random piles throughout the house.

My neighbors had discovered the break-in a couple of days before I returned home, and had called the police. The husband had accompanied the investigating officer inside in the hopes of being able to tell them what was gone, but the place was a such a disaster that it was hard to tell what remained and what didn’t. Every cabinet was emptied. Every drawer was overturned. He didn’t even know where to tell the police to begin.

But standing there in the bedroom, amidst piles of my belongings, everything changed. He spotted my red lace thong sitting on top of a pile. Gone was the image of the quiet bookworm. Now he had a different perspective, one that completely redefined the way he viewed me. Things have never been the same since. My simple presence in the room can make the poor man blush.

So let that be a lesson to you. No matter how well you think you know someone, there’s more to them than meets the eye.