“Mister,” she asked after she finished the test. “Can I use your charger?”
When they ask this, I say to hook their phones to the cable that’s plugged into my laptop. The unspoken implication is that they have to leave their phones on my desk — far from where they sit. After they squirm for a few seconds, I show them my chargers.
“Take one of these,” I say. “You can plug it into the socket under your desk.”
That is what she did. But then a few minutes later she came back. “Thank you, Mister,” she said, setting my charger on the desk.
“That was fast,” I said. “I thought my charger is slow.”
She smiled slightly and walked back to her desk, where one of her friends reached into their backpack and pulled out a different charger. A faster one.
“I see how it is,” I said, laughing.
Old man. Old charger.