Stalking the elusive office chatter

Sandra: “Can we get a monkey?”
Melissa: “Only if it can use a typewriter.”

Anyone who works around a small magazine office knows that conversations can sometimes be wonderful in its variety and incongruity and fleeting in nature. One must be quick to capture and preserve them.

The folks over at The New Quarterly literary magazine in Waterloo have posted a number of in-context, out-of-context and just needing-no-context examples on their blog The Literary Type. (The above was between Sandra Michalski,the office administrator and Melissa Krone, the managing editor.)

(I once worked in an office where our production manager was prone to the most plausible malapropisms (e.g. "an accumulating nimbus cloud") and weird word constructions, so much so that his workmates began to jot them down on napkins and scraps of paper wherever and whenever they happened and anthologized and presented them to him when he left for another job.)

There's no prize, but if you have similar workplace ephemera to share, click on Comments below.