Gobsmacked!

I think I first collided with the word "gobsmacked" several years ago when a friend of mine introduced me to Stephanie Kinsela's Shopaholic series, where the very British heroine used the word from time to time to mean she was completely taken aback. I thought it was pretty cool then, and I thought it was about the only "right" word to describe my encounter with a rather unusual new student in my office a couple of days ago.

With the age of my brain cells, I don't recall perfectly everything he said that sent me reeling, but I do remember seeing a tall, thin, dark young man whom I immediately assumed to be one of our graduate students—probably from India, judging from his looks but not so much from his voice, which was smooth, cool, and deep and accented in a way I couldn't quite peg, even after 16 years in a widely diverse engineering department.

I was finishing up an email to somebody when he materialized in my door. When I nodded him in, he strolled near my desk, ran his eyes pensively around the room and up and down the collection of old name tags hanging on my bulletin board and announced, "I can tell from your office that you've been here a long time." Well, yes, in the department for almost 17 years and in this office for probably 5 of those—and with plenty of clutter to attest to that.

"The model?" he asked. My daughter, who isn't really a model although she was trained as one. Her latest adventure is a job in a strip joint.

"And you don't care what people think of you." It wasn't a question but a statement, and it startled me off the train of thought on the email I was writing—which is pretty unusual for me. I couldn't help but laugh as I asked, "You can tell that because my office is a dump?"

"Well, yes, because your office is a dump," he nodded, "but also because you don't mind telling people your daughter is working in a strip joint." Okay, she's not actually stripping at the strip joint; she's a professional lighting designer, and she's designing and hanging the new lighting for a club that is reopening after having been closed for a couple of years. She makes a good deal more money as a lighting specialist than a stripper would, and she's using her profits to finance a helicopter trip through the Grand Canyon that I'd love to be able to share.

A bit more time with this student made me wish he were maybe 20 years older than he admits to being; his resume, which he had come to ask me to edit for him, showed that he entered our undergraduate engineering program with an MBA and several interesting job titles already in his history, and that history was a great deal more unconventional than any I think I've ever encountered. "Nontraditional student" comes to mind immediately, but "nontraditional" just somehow doesn't seem to cover it.

I think part of the fun was that he's not 20 years older, and it was pretty clear that that didn't matter; when a Shakira song came on my radio, he was first surprised that I listen to music not too diverse from what some of the other students might enjoy and second that it was a singer he said would be his first choice if he could pick a chick. That spoke volumes about his interests—I left any hopes of bearing any similarity to Shakira in the dust about 40 years ago!

I don't know whether I was gobsmacked more by the fact that he was as immediately perceptive (and willing to exploit that) as he was, or that he seemed to peg some things about me I didn't realize were so obvious to people. But it was fun to get an impetuous but gentle dose of it!