The result / My officemates

When I entered my office, Andreas started to laugh. No, wait, not to laugh, he just had printed on his face his expression of delighted satisfaction that he always wears when he's about to laugh and to make fun of somebody, and when he knows that this somebody knows that he's about to laugh, this just makes his satisfaction bigger. And his smiling too. Which was about to sublimate into laugh, by the way.

-"Nicola, is it you?"

I looked preoccupied:

-"Who is me??"

-"I mean, you've cut your beard?!"

Seriously, I didn't know how he could still refrain from bursting into laughing.

-"It doesn't look like."

-"It doesn't look like?"

-"Does it look like I've cut my beard or, fine, if you mean that pieces of my beard are missing from the surface of my face and it looks like they were torn out, then you're right, but I didn't mean it; I just happened to kill somebody when I was in the elevator and this is everything I managed to do to change my look before the doors opened. That's everything. I just wanted to shake them."

Of course at this point, like in a chess game where the move of your opponent makes you change completely your strategy, he didn't give me the satisfaction of having made him laugh and just went back to the monitor of his computer. Martha did. She laughed. But as always, while she was laughing she whispered something that I couldn't grasp. I smiled back and nodded to confirm. She liked me, I think... Maybe... At least I made her laugh. Often.
-"So, who did you happen to kill in the elevator??" said Martha while still laughing.
-"Mmm, it is just that our Weltanschaungs were not the same, I mean, he was talking about some patent and so I wanted to take my little revenge, to have the communistic revolution for just one day, all the blades the same length, the same number of blades for each person, say that you have to use them at least more than two times each, let's make two blades for five times, just to allow some free capitalistic spirit of enterprise, do you see, Martha? Ok, let me go back to my Gaussian functions...". At this point, as always, she didn't laugh either, and went back to her monitor, too, as nothing happened, but with a strange expression of indifference on her face which actually was not indifference, because she liked me... I think she didn't understand any longer whether I was joking or what and but since she was discreet, she didn't want to openly have a disagreement with me, probably with nobody, and so...