Swivel Heads

Okay, I know you know this about us already but......men are by nature swivel heads.
Meaning, we're pretty adept at scanning a room to look at pretty girls - without looking like we are - and carrying on a conversation too. Very adept. Almost ninja-master adept.

Case in point: the factory cafeteria. A place where you will at midday find a diverse gathering of men - and certainly mostly men. Yes, there is a seasoning of ladies. But, it's very small and already a known quantity. Men. Men who live for visitors.

Visitors like the young lady who graced us with some version of an internship last week. Not sure where she worked - don't really care. Only that she came to the cafeteria each day. She, a feast for the eyes. Voluminous platinum blonde hair. Set off in stunning contrast to her deeply tanned skin. Pretty. College girl pretty. Tastefully dressed in seat hugging slacks and a tasteful filled-out-nicely sweater. Yeow!

I noticed her in the main aisle out in the factory - Wait! my heightened senses flooded to my brain. What's out of place here? She! - headed for the cafeteria. A long straight main aisle headed the whole length of the plant. A long straightaway to walk casually behind her, all the while keeping up my meaningless chatter about March Madness to cover my busy eyeballs. "Yeah. Uh huh. How are your brackets doing?" Thinking OMG! Do you see that girl?

Did I see her? Oh yeah. In the entree line. By the salad bar. Uncertainty in her eyes as to where the drink fountain might be. A dessert? - pass. Through the check out line and out to a table. She wasn't always in my line of sight, but I always knew where she was alright. Pinpointed, the central focus of my over-the-horizon radar. And then out to her table in the center of the cafeteria, where she ate a quiet lunch each day with the young man who was escorting her.

What else did I see? Swivel heads. All around me. It was kind of funny actually. At one point I stopped watching her - not totally, I still knew each second exactly where she was - and started watching the guys watching her for a minute. Every one of them doing exactly the same thing as I was. Trying to check her out without being obvious and still assemble their meal through the food line. Every man in there keenly aware of her presence. From the youngest intern to the oldest retiree/consultant - swivel heads. From the white collar managers to the blue collar dirt-under-their-fingers machine guys - swivel heads. It was very funny, this recognition of a universal behavior in my fellow guys. All of them carrying on conversations that were not at all about what they were really thinking about, which was "OMG, do you see her?"

As the reknowned poet Fergie says in her epic ode "Fergalicious", we were "lining down the block just to look, what a "guy"."

My thanks go out the young lady. She livened up a cafeteria full of swivel-heads, and certainly helped my week pass.