Ministry of Bread & Fury

You ever have that feeling where you just can't seem to get your job done because of your job? Had one of those days today.

I thought my stress level would have ebbed after my Hitchhiker's speech was past me, cause that thing's been hanging over my head all month. However, now that it's gone, I can clearly see all the other giant weighty responsibilities that had been hanging there too.

A while back I mentioned here that I was putting together an online auction to benefit the local literacy group. Well, that got postponed twice because we didn't have any publicity arranged and is now due to start next week. Have we got the publicity arranged? Not before today, we didn't. (Competely my fault. I have to own that one.) So yesterday I wrote a piece about it for the library's newspaper column, which Mrs. A put in the column along with two other items she was already going to talk about and told me to edit the whole thing as I saw fit. She then fled the building never to be seen again.

Happy with the column, I took the disk on which the column was saved and used the information in it to write a press release. Only I managed to overwrite the newspaper column with the press release, closed it and reopened it so I couldn't undo any of my damage. Shortly after this, I noticed a huge glaring error in the supposedly camera-ready newspaper column I'd already printed, which had been my only backup saving grace. In order to fix my mess, I had to track down all of the additional material Mrs. A had gathered to reconstruct the column from the ground up.

That wasn't so hard.

What was so hard was not shitting out a monkey in my fury at all the interruptions to the task. Every time my butt hit the chair in front of the computer, someone came in or the phone rang. Who was calling? People who wanted to talk to Mrs. C, of course, who was also unavailable.

Why was Mrs. C unavailable? Well, see, tomorrow brings a big annual festival in Town-A. Area restaurants and civic groups line main street selling food items as a fund-raiser for themselves and a portion of the proceeds from each booth goes to benefit a local historic performance hall. We always have a booth and sell quick breads, which our loving patrons bake and donate to us to sell. We also bake quite a lot of the bread ourselves. Even me. However, quite a lot of the bread from the patrons does not come wrapped properly or labeled so Mrs. C had to go over to our activities room to see to that chore for a couple of hours, leaving me to run the desk alone.

So while I'm trying to get my shit together for the auction I was constantly interrupted by patrons coming in to bring us bread, or the phone ringing with people asking for Mrs. C, or asking what time we closed, or patrons with unholy thirsts for a computer, or books to check in or books to check out. (And on this front, I noticed today that, to a person, our patrons could pace the room for twenty minutes with an armload of books, but they would NOT make a move for the desk to check out until I gave up waiting on them and went to sit back down at the computer to work. Then it was suddenly a stampede to get out. And this happened EVERY time those circumstances occurred.)

I also had to work on the auction website during all this, trying to get it whipped into shape enough to deserve publicity. Working on the website when I'm alone at the desk is often infuriating and the cause of more monkey shitting. Our webserver is located at the circ desk, but is on the floor in the bottom of a small cabinet beneath the desk itself. To use it, you have to sit on the floor with the keyboard resting on your lap and the world's dirtiest mouse suckin' up the dust bunnies every time you move it. It's nearly useless to try and get anything done with it when you're alone, though, because as soon as you sit down the door opens and needy patrons start pouring through it, or the phone rings, etc., and you have to get up to take care of it. I hate it, and I long for the day when we can have a REAL computer in a REAL office dedicated to the task with a damn lock on the door and no phone!

Of course, you can't have Mrs. A and Mrs. C both effectively gone without an appearance from Mr. Kreskin, our board president. He rolled in around 3 with a goodly number of pages he wanted me to photocopy for him. Oddly, he didn't even ask about Mrs. A or Mrs. C or their whereabouts. And he insisted on paying for his copies.

Finally, around 4 p.m., Mrs. C returned, saw the demented gleam in my eye and the fact that I was air-stabbing patrons behind their backs and told me to go on break. I grabbed the finished press release and column and walked `em down to the paper.

When I came back a half hour later, Mrs. C left for good, failing to alert me that Wal-Mart Jesus was in the building. He didn't have a lot of time to hang around, though, so I didn't have to teach him how to use the internet again. He only had me photocopy four pages from the encyclopedia for him before he gathered up his cudgel and bag and left.