The following conversation took place on a bench right next to me in the Fulton Street 4-5 subway station yesterday afternoon between a suited late-20s businessman and an elder, similarly dressed businessman. My thoughts as this is taking place are in the brackets.
YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN: That was a good meeting.
OLDER BUSINESSMAN (in light Scottish accent): They’re a good company, I was impressed.
YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN: We should do lunch again sometime.
[OK. Right off the bat -- this is not real human speech. This is the opening three lines to every sketch that will ever be written about Wall Street businessmen to quickly establish that they are businessmen and have just come from a "business meeting," because that's what Wall Street businessmen always do. And who still says "let's do lunch?" I thought that expression had been exclusively relegated to goofy t-shirts and mug designs.]
OLDER BUSINESSMAN: At what intervals do the trains run, every five minutes?
YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN: Yeah.
[All right, picture's becoming a little clearer -- the older guy is a European businessman meeting with an American company about something that somehow generates more money than I would even think to write into my movie script about a high-profile bank heist, and he's on his way back to his unnecessarily luxurious hotel alongside his street-smart U.S. liaison.]
YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN (Pulls out iPhone): I’m gonna check some emails.
[WHAT?? Why is he speaking out loud so literally? Again, this is not how humans actually talk, except in radio serials to make sure people know exactly what they're doing. And pulling out the iPhone -- of course! Why wouldn't he? It almost seems like something a character would do in a beer commercial -- "Hey man, got my new SuperPhone, gonna check some emails" (Bucket of green slime falls on him for some reason) "Sorry dude, you should've had a Bud Light!"]
YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN starts laughing very loudly.
OLDER BUSINESSMAN: What?
YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN (Pointing to his phone): Check this out. It’s Eliot Spitzer in “Pretty Woman.”
[Without having seen it myself, I immediately imagine this picture -- a really obvious Spitzer-with-a-hooker Photoshop that BWE and every other website in the world basically thought of three seconds after the story broke.]
OLDER BUSINESSMAN: Send that to me.
YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN: Hang on a sec. (Types for a couple seconds. Waits.)
OLDER BUSINESSMAN laughs really, really loudly
[While it's nice to know that not everyone is so jaded by the internet that they can still derive laugh-out-loud pleasure from something as simple as Eliot Spitzer's head on Richard Gere's body eighty-five days after news of the scandal broke, I'm not sure how seeing the photo on his own mobile device was exponentially that much funnier than looking at the same pic ten seconds earlier on his friend's phone.]
YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN: Train’s here.
[Of course it is -- there is now a huge, metal transportation machine with people in it coming to a screeching halt three feet away from us. My only thought as we boarded the train was, if I suddenly wake up in my bed with a copy of the Wall Street Journal on my nightstand, not being able to tell if the exchange I had just witnessed actually happened or was one of those cryptic movie dreams, I'll be very, very upset.]
