Anudda Munday

Christmas vacation went well, even if it was pretty short.

I left my in-law's place in North Carolina this morning around 8:45 and hit the road for home. My wife is staying behind to visit with her peeps for a few more days while I have to return to West Virginia. Mrs. B is still out following her surgery and also managed to develop pneumonia, so she wasn't able to return last week as she'd planned so I get another week of near constant fill-in. Like I told my boss when she broke that bad news to me, though, "It's not like I don't want the money." Mrs. A also wanted me to come back today to help Mrs. C on her Monday shift since our records from last year indicated a horrific amount of patron traffic (which is to say, a usual Monday) on the corresponding day.

So I hauled my tail over several mountains in order to get home by the time the library opened at 1 p. I almost made it on time too, but I stopped along the way to shop for shoes.

For the record: there is no place in the Tri-Metro area where a person can buy a decent pair of athletic shoes that don't look like they fell out of a clown's ass.

"Hey, Spanky, how bout slappin' a pair of Reebok Highposts or just about anything by Dada, on your tired old dogs. It's like the `70's, but for your feet!"

Who buys such hideous footwear? All I want is plain white athletic shoes with a minimum of logos and other such gaudy shit on them! Is that too much to ask?!! Well in Tri-Metro, yes, it is.  In other towns, however, not so much. I was able to find a nice pair of plain white Skechers which were, as an added bonus, on sale. The delay for shopping, plus about a dozen slow-ass people on the two lane highway I chose to take back, put me around 4 minutes past 1 p.m. getting to work.

I cruised through downtown Town-A, passing Mr. B-Natual and Bubba on the way, parked in front of the "liberry" and walked through the door into the usual Monday madness. Mrs. C was there, womanning the desk solo. Well, not entirely solo. She did have Lennie there, who was on his regular Monday shift and was shelving videos as I walked in.

As she told me later, once things had calmed down a bit, she had already emptied the book return THREE times that morning before even opening for business. Then, at 1, there were people pounding on the door to get in, three of which hauled ass for the computer sign in sheet and then descended on the computers to get their raging "3 whole days without the innanet DT's" fix going. They were so quick that they completely left Mr. B-Natural in their signup sheet dust and he was unwilling to wait around for a computer to free up, hence why I saw him driving away.

The rest of the day was very busy, but it's a tolerable thing when you have two people on the job. I've told Mrs. A repeatedly that we need a second person on shift on Mondays instead of just leaving Mrs. C at the mercy of it's chaos. She's even suggested it to Mrs. C, but her point is that Mondays are hot and cold--it's full on busy one minute then nothing for upwards of an hour at a time, then another inexplicable burst and then more nothing. It's hard to justify having someone else in if they're just going to have to sit around and pick their nose.

I wouldn't mind getting paid to pick my nose. Back when I worked for Onstar, I once got paid time and a half to guard ice-cream and read a Neil Gaiman book. That's right. I was already working overtime one weekend, things were slow, the company needed someone from my department to go sit in the break room and guard the free ice-cream they were giving to employees, I told them, "I'm your man. I'd love to be paid time and a half to watch cream." I'd be up for such lunacy again.