Heigh Ho! - Working in Geneva

Ho Hum

I've gone back to work. Rejoining the ranks of the employed has been really satisfying, now I get to go somewhere every day with a real purpose, rather than hoiking the girls into the pushchair and idly wondering off to the supermarket to kill some time before lunch. Although I confess I do miss them. After the new year, before I got my job, when we had just employed the nanny, was the period I like to call "the phony work". I spent most of my time in the library.

Having hired the nanny I need to find or do work, so I was writing, writing job applications, browsing the internet, browsing library goers. I am glad I no longer have to do all that, now I just write. It took up most of my days, except Mondays, when inexplicably the library was closed.
I liked the collection of odd people who used the library as often as I did. Thankfully, because it's a library, regulars couldn't actually talk to each other. So even though we must have recognised fellow regulars I guess we just ignored the fact that we saw the same people everyday.
That's alright for most people, because as they change their clothes, their bag, and their hair and their coats each day you can sort of get away with not realising they are the same person, so you never have to give away actual recognition.
But contrary to this one man in the library really stood out. From the first time I saw him I was intrigued and never  really figured out what he was doing there. Glancing at his screen he had spreadsheets open, and also what looked like tickers and graphs, so perhaps he was a dealer in something, but why use a public network?
What made him stand out? The first time I saw him he was wearing a suit. In a library! I nearly fell over, I didn't know Geneva was so formal. I assumed he was an astute travelling businessman who had found somewhere to get online before he caught his airplane, so Imagine my horror when I saw him the next day. A guy in a dark blue pin stripe suit, the suit  was pretty old, dark hair, short (hair and height), massive unwieldy laptop. I was intrigued. Of course I never spoke to Suit Man. In fact, going to a public library, sitting in the work room everyday wearing a suit, is a pretty good advert for saying leave me alone.
When I had grown tired of applying or browsing I wrote short stories about the other people in the library, but so disturbed was I by Suit Man's behaviour I never came up with a story for him. Instead I felt sorry for his wife, who clearly though he was going to work every day, and then I felt sorry for him for when she found out he didn't actually have a job. Mostly though I was horrified by his clothing decision; attending a public library full of high school and uni students dressed in a suit, must, I felt, be depressing, demoralising and nauseating. I don't know what happened to him, as I found a job, thankfully.