Body Check!

I body checked a rogue patron today.

Well, okay, I didn't body check them exactly. But I did hit one pretty squarely in the chest with my elbow. And I didn't apologize for it.

According to my fellow employees, we had absolutely no patron traffic in the building for nearly the first hour of our workday. At 9:45 a.m., Mr. Perfect arrived to use a computer. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, the innanet crowd followed in behind him and the computers remained completely packed for the next several hours. (And when Mr. Perfect finally left our building at nearly 4 o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs. C told him that we blamed him for the crowd, as they had not arrived until he did. "Please take them with you," I urged. He declined.)

By the time I arrived Mrs. C and Mrs. A were nuts from keeping up with the computers. Mrs. C, anxious to pass the crazy baton along, told me the patron on computer #6 was the next one scheduled to be booted if someone came in. And who should arrive at that moment but Mr. B-Natural.

While he was signing up, I went over to computer #6 to alert the patron that we needed her computer. What I didn't know was that Mr. B-Natural had signed the clip-board in record time and was now tailgating me, as though there somehow weren't at least a minute's lagtime between the point I tell a patron we need their computer and the point where they actually get off, not to mention the whole matter of rebooting. It's like he thought I was going to rip her out of the chair and offer it to him right then. So after I broke the news to the patron and turned back to the desk, Mr. B-Natural was RIGHT ON MY HEELS and I wound up elbowing him in the solar plexus completely by accident.

If it had been nearly anyone else, I would have apologized profusely, but my thought at the time was that getting elbowed was Mr. B-Natual's own damn fault since he was practically up my ass to begin with. I walked away without a word and he didn't complain beyond a slight "oof!" after being struck.

I told the wife about this later. She said my behavior was very rude and that I was a horrible person.

"But it was only a little very rude," I said.

"No. It was very very rude."

"But only a little."

"Nope. Very."

I think I probably lost that one.