I enjoy listening in to other people's conversations. As a writer it is important to understand the way that people actually talk in real life and you never know when you might overhear something that you can use or that gives you an idea. But also it's fun to be nosey.
Sometimes though people give you an insight into their lives and their personalities without you even trying to listen in. It's amazing what people will say, at volume, out in the street. Or maybe it's just my peripheral hearing that allows me to home in on chat at a distance like some kind of slightly rubbish superhero.
I was walking through Camden this evening when I chanced across a fragment of conversation that I found amusing enough to write down as soon as I could. A woman walking behind me was talking to a friend. I didn't turn round and so I didn't see them, but this is what the woman said:
"He said, "I haven't missed a day at work for seven years and that was when I was having a lung removed from my body."
And I said, "A-ha-ha-ha. You've only got one lung!" It just came out instinctively.
And he said, "Hannah, leave now and never come back.""
How brilliant is that? I assume that Hannah was having this conversation with a boss, a boss tired of her petty absenteeism and trying to show her what sort of emergencies he felt justified a day off. So he brings up this impressive story of what it would take him to miss a day of work - the removal of a major bodily organ. But his useless employee, far from being impressed by his perspicacity, just finds it amusing that he has a pulmonary deficiency and laughs at him. What option did he have but to let this feckless idiot go? It certainly can't have been the reaction he would have expected. Who finds the fact that someone has had a lung removed to be amusing? It's not like a bad hair cut or even a funny nose or being fat, which some people might laugh about. It's the absence of an internal organ. And even worse, it's the missing internal organ, not of a friend, but of your boss who is clearly pissed off with you already.
I don't know if Hannah felt she had been hard done by, or whether she was retelling some story from the past to reveal how stupid she once was. But the fact that she defended her actions as instinctive does seem to suggest that she is the kind of person who thinks major internal organ surgery is something to laugh about. So maybe she was looking for sympathy rather than to be pilloried by her friend and anyone who was in earshot and happened to write a popular blog (and loads of people must have heard her booming voice - there was nothing wrong with her lungs).
I do quite like the way she deflated the arrogant pride of her former boss, as successfully as the surgeon had deflated his lung. He'd thought he was the big man and was showing off about how brilliant and committed he was and all she took from the story was that he was a one-lunged idiot.
Personally I think the story would only have been impressive if he'd said, "I haven't missed a day of work in seven years - not even the day I had a lung removed from my body. I just started breathing through the other one and came in and got in with stuff."
The bit I like as a writer though, and which shows you that people talk in ways that might not follow conventional grammar are logic is the phrase - "that was when I was having a lung removed from my body." I don't know if this is how her boss really described it, but this is how she chose to relate it. Most people would say something about having lung surgery, or just say "having a lung removed" and assume it was from his body, rather than from up his chimney or down his toilet (unless he was
Dennis Nilsen). Saying "having a lung removed from my body" almost makes it sound like it wasn't taking place in a hospital, maybe that some lung thief had just mugged him and removed it or it was some king of entertainment act. But it's not a line you would ever write if you were making something up, yet it is the way that people talk.
Alas I carried straight on and Hannah turned right, so I didn't get to hear any more of her story, but I think I'd chanced upon the choice part.
