What do you call a co-worker these days? Neither teammate nor confederate will do, and partner is too legalistic. The answer brought from academia to the political world by Henry Kissinger and now bandied in the boardroom is colleague. It has a nice upper-egalitarian feel, related to the good fellowship of collegial.
In Italy I had an Afro and a lot of the kids came up and felt my hair. It really was funny. I wish I had understood Italian.