"You have a very strange system of sympathies" --my boss

I'm not saying that Catalans or Spaniards are nice -- they're not mean, I just wouldn't describe them collectively as nice, the way I might with Mexicans or Portuguese or Canadians -- but when they're being nice, they sound really nice. Like when I buy something and say think you and they say A tí, guapa, it makes the person saying it sound like the nicest person in the world, even if I was just mad at them for ignoring me for minutes (minutes!) before getting me a bocadillo or the check or whatever. A heartfelt-sounding A tí, guapa makes the bad service almost not matter, that's now nice it sounds, even if it is really just the Spanish-language equivalent of no prob.

The students are never that nice, but the situation is similar; sometimes I get such an inexplicable kick out of them that it cancels out how much I usually hate them. They had this test today and it was a multiple choice test and when they take multiple choice tests here they have separate answer sheets that they write on but I fucked up and forgot to pick up the answer sheets. I was going to grade them by hand anyway, so it actually seemed easier to not screw around with answer sheets. But they were all so concerned about whether or not they had marked their answers right. Who doesn't know how to take a multiple choice test? One guy, a burlyish fraternity-looking guy, circled his answers and put little dots next to them and then showed me what he did to make sure it was ok. Am I the only one who finds that hilarious and adorable? (Is that maybe the very definition of charm -- the ability to make people forget that they actually hate you?)

Ok, fine, so I have terrible taste. We knew that. I'm not going to change those little fuckers, so I might as well settle for any little shreds of entertainment I can get from them, right?