Last night was Presbytery night in the Waterloo-Wellington and, as is usually the case, it was a meeting that had its ups and downs — its high points and its low points.

After adjournment, as happens in many Presbyteries I am sure, some of the members made arrangements to break up a long drive home by stopping off at a local watering hole to talk over (and commiserate over) the events of the evening.

About seven members ended up sitting around a table in a bar. Just by chance, they all happened to be male and they all happened to be clergy.

We talked together and toasted various discussion points from earlier in the evening. We toasted the committees and agencies of the Presbytery and the Presbyterian Church with good will towards all. We were enjoying one another’s company.

The place was mostly empty but there was a friendly group over at the bar — paramedics, it turned out, at the end of their shift. We interacted a bit and they made a few comments about how we were all dressed alike (we all had short sleeved dress shirts open at the collar. I would’t have thought much about it but they called it our “uniform”).

Uniform?

Anyways, they were talking together for a while. Little did we suspect that they where overhearing our conversation and speculating. They had decided that, whatever we did, we were all in the same line of work and were trying to figure it what that line was.

Finally they could stand it no longer and interrupted us to ask us what we did.

We, of course, refused to answer until they had told us what their guesses were.

Based on how we were dressed and what they had heard us talking about, they guessed that we were:

1) Zehr’s executives gathering after a long day of strategy meetings. (Zehr’s is a grocery chain in our part of Ontario.)

2) Failing that, perhaps we all worked in the deli department at Zehr’s.

3) Accountants

4) A bunch of museum curators.

The honest truth, those were their guesses.

Don’t know whether to laugh that they were so far off base…

or cry because they were so close to the truth.