The heat and humidity broke on Monday, finally. On Tuesday we opened the windows to the office to let in a little dry air. Our congregation’s office is in the basement, and it gets pretty damp, so the dry air felt good. It felt so good that Claudette, the administrator, opened the door, too.

We were sitting in the office working at computers, fielding phone calls, I was muttering to myself as I tried to make sense out of some files left by the interim minister. OUt of the corner of my eye, I saw two people walk into our office. I don’t yet know everyone in the congregation, but I was pretty sure these two people weren’t members of the congregation. They looked like salespeople to me. They smiled too readily for real New Englanders. He was dressed in a dark blue three piece suit with a faint pin stripe. Not even the lawyers who go in and out of the court house wear a three piece suit in the summer. And they don’t show off their suits as this fellow did; for lawyers it’s just a uniform. As for the woman, she wore business-like black slacks, but her top was cut just a little too low for an ordinary person.

They both made far too much eye contact. Yup, salespeople. I said hello.

“How are you? said the woman brightly.

“Very very busy,” I said, hoping she would get the hint. I smiled (I’m very good at forcing smiles since I used to be a salesman myself), and deliberately turned back to my work. I hoped Claudette could extract us from this.

“Hello,” said Claudette. Claudette managed to stay polite, but she injected a huge dose of scepticism in that one word.

“Hi, we’re from Quill Office Products,” began the woman. She did not have a New Bedford accent.

“You were just over here,” said Claudette. “Not you, but someone from your office.”

“Yes, well, we sent…” began the woman. Her smile did not falter one iota when Claudette interrupted her again.

“I’ll tell you what I told her,” said Claudette. “We’re very small, and we don’t order much at any one time. We don’t use more than a few reams of paper a month. It’s a small office, and we just don’t order much.” She paused to take a breath.

“That’s OK, we…” the woman tried to interject, but Claudette kept right on.

“And we get everything from Staples, right across the river,” said Claudette. “We like to buy from a place that’s local. Not that Staples is exactly local, they’re owned by a big conglomerate, but they employ local people, and they bring jobs into the city.”

As Claudette stopped to take a breath, the woman tried to start in again, but Claudette just talked right over her. This went on for two or three minutes. Caludette is very very good, but I could see that Claudette was not wearing them down. The woman’s smile was still just as bright as when she came in. The man stood absolutely silent and stock still, and I guessed that his role was to take over should the woman ever falter. It seemed unlikely that she would ever falter.

So I butted in. “I’m Claudette’s boss,” I said. “We’re not going to buy anything. We really don’t have time to talk right now. We’re very busy.” I smiled again, very politely, but I bared my teeth.

Unbelievably, they left. I think they were already intimidated by Claudette, and quailed at the thought of having to take on some strange man with a pony tail whose role wasn’t very clear except that he was Claudette’s boss. Or was he?

We agreed that they would be back next month. A few minutes later, Claudette said, “I think I’m going to close the door now. There are too many flies coming in.” Big black lazy flies buzzing around and around driving us crazy.