New Levels of Intimacy

My new best friend at work is Mail Guy number 2 (I'll just call him MG2). Mail Guy number 1 (big, black sweetheart, who looks like an oversized first-grader) is also my friend, but his shift is in the morning when I tend to be more committed to working and we don't usually have conversations. Mail Guy number 2 is a short, brown-haired, light-skinned Chilean engineer, who (after working for over a year at various construction sites illegally) won a green card and now has the privilege to use his engineering degree from Chile to push around a cart with annoying lawyers' internal mail. (There was an article in The New Yorker Magazine about how green card winners end up working in menial jobs for which they are totally over-qualified for years). MG2 goes to school in the morning to improve his English, where his teacher is a certain Mrs. Szabo, an old Hungarian woman, who has lived here for decades (and probably still has a shockingly strong Hungarian accent, which, apparently, makes her good enough to teach English to South Americans). He works the late-shift over here and, predictably, is bored to death doing it, but he plans on getting out eventually. I found all of this out in the course of many 3-minute conversations and I'd say that with an approximate total of about 2 hours of pure personal conversations he is the person that I know best at the firm. Such friendships have many benefits - just now he dropped off two giant chocolate chip cookies and a brownie (I ate that already) from a birthday party held in the nether regions of our wonderful skyscraper.

As to the lawyers, I still only talk to two people: the two that I work with. M., the woman I shared a deal with, has invited me out to lunch once already and I also know that she has been married for a few years to a former law school classmate and that she lives on the Upper east Side. I gathered that she is Jewish from a passing comment on Passover and that she made her husband take her name in exchange for taking his (this latter piece of information is about the most interesting thing about her). S., the man that I currently share a deal with is probably the least WASP-y person here (aside from the occasional Jew and the Asians, of course): he has dark hair, dark, slightly almond-shapes eyes and olive-colored skin, but I can't determine his background and up to very recently we only talked about the deal. Now he talks to me about basketball and baseball and I asked him about his girlfriend, a pretty, short latina girl, whose picture is on his desk. She is "on the bar scene," which means that she is an ex-bartender-turned-doorman(girl?) and they live together in Queens. None of the others have spoken to me, but I have not tried to talk to them either.

As for the partners, the door-man called me "kiddo" today. Now that's a new level of (bizarre) intimacy.