I’m having ice cream with my kids when President Obama enters the shop. He’s with his family and an entourage of bodyguards and camera people. Phones start popping up from my fellow patrons to record the Commander in Chief as he casually walks up to the counter and makes conversation with the scoopers and the manager. He’s very gracious, and also very tall.

The First Lady and the First Daughters find a table to sit and enjoy their cones of sweet frozen splendour, but Barack decides to make the rounds. Our family’s seated closest to the register, so he happens upon me first.

“Hello!” he says, extending his hand. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Jennifer.” I shake the president’s hand with gusto.

“And what do you do for a living, Jennifer?”

“I work in strategic sourcing at InsuriCorp.” That line I delivered perfectly.

“Strategic sourcing! What’s that like?”

Oh no. This is when I suddenly realise that I don’t know what strategic sourcing is. I don’t know what I do for a living. I check in to work at nine and I check out at five and I pay literally no attention to what it is I’m doing. In truth, I don’t like it very much and I’m not very good at it and all my life I’ve been faking it. Most of the time I hold my phone under my desk and spend my working hours scrolling through Facebook and Twitter and Reddit. When my boss asks me what I’m doing I mumble a few corporate buzzwords, which somehow is miraculously enough to get her to stop asking me what I’m doing, but sooner or later I know they’re all going to find out I’m a fraud who definitely doesn’t deserve to be sitting in the cubicle she currently occupies forty hours a week. It’s only a matter of time. I try to structure my professional life around avoiding being grilled on what exactly it is that I am doing, otherwise it all falls apart. But when you’re being grilled by the POTUS, what can you say?

What can I say? After I delivered my I work in strategic sourcing at InsuriCorp line, perfectly (I might add), I sort of expected President Obama to just leave it at that. He’s got a lot of other adoring fans to attend to. Does he actually know what goes on in strategic sourcing? He might. I imagine he meets a lot of ordinary people in all kinds of professions, maybe he does have a sense of that. Does he need to know? Does he care? As the leader of the free world, he must have a lot of other worries and cares on his shoulders. But here he is right now, in front of me, interested in me! And presumably, interested in what I have to say as an American citizen. I guess there aren’t many of us at the ice cream parlour at this hour. Maybe that’s why he judges that he can spend a bit more time getting to know each of us? And why should I complain? Who among us gets to have an actual honest-to-goodness down-to-earth non-trivial conversation with Barack fucking Obama? I just wish I had more time to think about what I could say.

“Uh … I don’t know!” is what I do manage to say. Fuck.

“I see. Well, it’s been good to see you, Jennifer.” I manage a genial smile, but I am mortified. He continues on to my daughters. “And what’s your name?”