紛至沓來 / 纷至沓来
fēn zhì tà lái
“numerous arrive numerous come”
to come thick and fast
The university college I was working at had appointed a new director. (It shall remain unidentified for obvious reasons.)
He was a banker in his previous job, so the first thing on his new-broom-sweeps-clean list of chores was to try and save money, starting with proposing to shut down the Linguistics Department.
Huge waves of protests from within the school: how can a school of languages be without a Linguistics Department??
I arrived one morning for work to find one of the porters, Ian, emerging from the telex room (which was on the other side of the corridor from the reception desk), hands full of reels of telex, shaking his head. Asked what the matter was, he said, “The machine hasn’t stopped spewing out incoming telexes from universities all over since the director’s decision to close down the Linguistics Department.”
I asked, “What do they all say?”
He said, “Only what a prat he was.”
Another day, I arrived to find that I had to go round the building and get in through the side door (which I never knew existed before), as the driveway in front of the main entrance was being dug up. I asked Ian what was happening there. He said, “Oh, the director dropped a penny, and they’re looking for it.” (It turned out that the chancellor of the college was visiting, so they were sprucing up the place a bit.)
(London, 1980s)]
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