Today's lunch was a goodbye lunch for a colleague who is retiring. Again. We went to a Mexican place that had rockin' chimichangas. (I so love chimmies, but man does my blood sugar pay for it…it's been four hours and I'm still in the upper 200s despite taking oodles of insulin.)
As we munched on chips and salsa while waiting for our entrees, we asked B if he had any plans yet. Was he going to travel right away? Just sit around and do nothing? What?
"Well, we'll probably do some babysitting first," B said with a chuckle. B and his wife H don't have children and from what I can understand adore watching their grand nieces and nephews.
"Will you go to California or will they come here?" R asked.
"New Jersey," B said.
It was loud and B can be softspoken, so it was difficult to keep up even though he was sitting right next to me.
"My niece and her husband are going to Florida for his job…he's been working like 80-hour weeks for a year on a new project for the company…they're going to Florida for the product rollout," B said.
Working for a company that supports human resources, much of our daily discussions center around the economy, the job market, layoffs, etc. So for a company to be paying for its employees and their spouses to travel to another state for a new product was pretty impressive to us.
"What company does he work for?" R (our department head) asked.
"Novo Nordisk," B said.
I nearly choked on my chips and apparently made some hideous noise that caught R's attention.
"You're interested in them?" R asked. "They're a big pharmaceutical company."
"They make insulin," I said, realizing after I said it that I don't think they actually make insulin but produce a gadzoodle of diabetes-related products.
"Do you know what the product is?" I asked hoping for a scoop. (I was never very good at investigative reporting.)
"No," B said. "Nobody does. He's not allowed to talk about it. In fact, when all the people working on the project get together they are locked in an office and even the president of the company can't get in."
"Maybe it's a cure," I snickered.
If only…
