Darter

Tim was a kind of person who could talk about anything without any regard to his listeners, providing too much unnecessary details of personal nature. His loud voice with South African accent would fill the room in manner, which was ultimately distracting and very hard to ignore. 

While some of Tim’s stories would reveal interesting insights about times when he and his fellow students protested against Apartheid in eighties, more often than not Tim would choose some awkward topic, like his latest prostate exam dilemma or some other encountered medical oddity.

Time after time he would dive into linguistic peculiarities of African clicking languages or share something shocking about Afrikaans words. 

“They have that word” - would bellow Tim, sending shockwaves in more than one way - “twerh - which means ‘pervert, who sniffs bicycle seats of schoolgirls’”.

Questions would explode at once. Why do they have a short word for that? Why did we need to know that? How did we manage to bring conversation to that point at all?

Eventually, we got used to Tim’s sleazy revelations. So when he mentioned word “darter” for a first time, I naturally without any hesitation assumed that it was another vulgar South African euphemism. Darter would juicily roll out of Tim’s tongue like malfunctioning tractor emphasising R in almost piratic fashion.

“I’ve got a nice big darter which needs a little bit of cleaning and massaging”, - said Tim smiling dreamingly. 

I googled “darter”, just in case. Nope, it is definitely not a bird, Tim was into orchids. 

“Guys, if you would like to see my darter afterwards, just let me know”, - offered Tim.

It felt that it really would make him very happy if we would agree to look at his clean and massaged darter. I glanced around, nobody was particularly enthusiastic about that proposition.

Next time things got weirder and somewhat even more disturbing.

“I have sliced my darter, it looks much better now”, - claimed Tim with a clear sense of achievement.

He was not in any kind of distress, though.

Mystery continued for a while. One week somebody got new darter and would show it to him or would give it to him to play with, another time darter was not very good as it was not large enough. 

“Does he have to share all that with us?” - I thought annoyed, - “There must be some boundaries”. 

Finally, Tim claimed that he was running out of space and therefore will have to get rid of his darter. That was a last straw.

“Guys, what is darter?” - I enquired utterly puzzled and confused, when Tim finally left our office. 

David looked at me in disbelief, - “You got to be kidding!?”

Something in my expression convinced him that I was not kidding and the answer came as a sucker punch,

 - “It is not darter, it’s data”.