the cheese stands alone

Just Don't Ask To See the Batcave

Best recently overheard curse:
"Holy ballsack, Batman!"

For Those Of You Keeping Score

I arrived at work today to find Blondie had quit. Wait, no, she was fired. Well, not really fired, since she kind of just stopped showing up and was released for "job abandonment".
There were a dozen variations on this theme, but it all came down to the sad conclusion that she was gone, never to darken my fairy floss'd little world again.
Now I have to find a new debate partner.

Signs of the Apocalypse, Part Two

I have learned that I am to be The Trainer at work, specifically for the Fairy Floss cart but also employee procedure in general for my department.
This, after complaints of intellectual elitism, malingering, and general floss abuse.
I will be training the latest hire crop of America's Youth... a pack of 16-19 year olds just begging for the Fairy Floss Floozie (patent pending) treatment. Luckily, it's a one-on-one deal so I don't have to worry about a mutiny.

Upon first learning this, I screamed like a sharp stick was being poked into my eyeball vaguely protested, as I myself have been on the job (does that sound so very "Cops" or what?) a scant three months. I then was told I'd set a record of sorts by not bringing small weaponry to work and working out my complaints in an explosive fashion staying in my position for so long. (It's also what made me so popular at the Bunny Ranch, but that's a tail for another day.)
This all came from my failure to kill the appropriate person in the chain of management recent training of young Allen, an event I thought was just a one-off. Young Allen is barely 16 and his first question was "how old are you?" I told him that asking women their age would not advance his. Then I told him, and watched as he turned pale and examined me surreptitiously for signs of senility and hip-breakage.
I then discovered the joyous part of Training America's Youth.... they will believe anything.
Anything.
I taught Young Allen the following things:
1. It is possible to lick your eyebrows if you train your tongue by regularly tugging on it.
2. Women like it immensely when you open doors for them.
3. Fairy floss was invented in Russia by a monk named Rasputin.
4. Xbox is vastly superior to PS2 and is used by the CIA to train deep cover operatives.
5. I once owned a mountain lion named Percy who ate twinkies.
6. If you make a joke and the tourist doesn't get it, be sure to wink. They will either then be signaled that it was a joke, or they'll think you're coming on to them. Fun either way.
7. The whiter the tourist, the colder the clime they come from. (This had to be explained with diagrams and a brief lecture on Mr. Sun and the reason for the seasons.)
8. Fairy floss has crack in it, but only random batches. This is why people will pay $3 for a small bit of it.
9. The louder a child screams, the more likely the parents will buy it anything to shut it up.
10. The louder a child screams near you, the more likely you will "accidentally" throw things at it when the parent isn't looking.
11. Don't throw anything away. Someone will buy it. Even with a shoe print on it.
12. Never, ever answer the phone on your day off.

I think Young Allen will do well.
If only he'd quit bringing his friends by, pointing at me and saying "Guess how old she is?"

(Yes, this is a roundabout but rather blatant rip-off of the celebrated "What I Learned" Friday, pioneered by blogger extraordinaire Lee of Oh No The Blog. When I pirate, I pirate the best.)

I'm a Doctor, Jim, Not a Floozie

I'm "on call" today. That means if something goes awry at work they'll call me and I'll have to go in and man (floozie?) the fairy floss cart. Which beggars an interesting question: what the hell could possibly be so bloody urgent about fairy floss that they'd have to send out for help? Not like there could be a shortage... the workplace is chock-full of fairy floss, popcorn, and Big Honking Pretzel carts, like mines in a battlefield, tucked behind bushes and plopped in the middle of walkways.
It's just another way of upper management saying "We have you now. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. We say frog and you jump. We fantasize a lot, too."

But on a tangent.... what other jobs is it silly to think they have "emergencies"?
Such as....
Ice cream truck: "Look, the baby's been peacefully napping for over 15 minutes.. where is that damn ice cream truck with its annoyingly piercing music?"
Convenience store clerk: "Oh my god, we're out of Slurpee Starter (patent pending) and Akmed is the only one who knows how to make it! Lock the doors! LOCK THE DOORS!"
Air conditioner repairman at the North Pole: "No ma'am, we don't make weekend calls. Open a freekin' window, why doncha?"
Pool cleaner: this only happens in letters to Penthouse

Is your job "emergency-ible"?

The Floozie Returns For the Nonce

Well, the party's over. Granted, it was a party born of bodily functions gone awry, but I wasn't at work.... we all know any day not at work is a day at party.
Party... party... party... my girl wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the tiiiiiiiii-ime!
Sorry, was channeling Eddie "I Want To Be Michael Jackson" Murphy for a second there.
And as ever, if something blogworthy happens, rest assured you'll hear about it.

In other work (ha! I never get tired of snickering when I say that!) related news, I received a jury duty notice in the mail last week. Unfortunately, because I love jury duty, it's not guaranteed that I'll be required to serve, or to even go to the courthouse. The system here is that you call a Special Phone Number the weekend before your stated Monday date, and a recording tells you if you're needed to go in on Monday. If you aren't, that's the end of it and you're thrown back in the pool for next year. If you are, you show up Monday and (if you're me) hope you get picked for a trial sometime during the day while you wait in a room full of people who mostly don't want to be there and who, unaware of their great blogging fodder value, do some great Silly Courthouse Monkey tricks.
One of the reasons I love jury duty is I am, like most bloggers, fascinated by the oddities of other lives. And where better to study how off-track some people have gone than the judicial system? The yelling, the lies, the conflicting facts, the badly-acted drama.... and not just the lawyers, either.
So I'll be practicing my "Impartial Open-Minded Look" (patent pending) for jury selection for the next couple of weeks, and keeping my fingers crossed.
Because you've already figured out the biggest bonus of this, haven't you?
It will drive them simply insane at work.

The Fairy Floss Floozie Fails To Fulfill

"dire-rear
the mad poops
the skitters
the Hershey squirts
spontaneous high colonic
diarrhea
got it?"
Yes, I am on the mend and progressing toward a goop-free sinusy lifestyle, thanks to modern medicine and lying about like a discarded sock plenty of rest. Since one of the side effects of the current antibiotic is dire-rear (say it fast, it sounds just like what causes it), I had the most recent doc write me a Note For Work, more accurately a note to not have to go to work until Day X.
Now, ever since I got the plague was taken ill, I have been entirely By The Book as far as work is concerned. I called in sick every morning within the appropriate time window to the correct office. I turned in the appropriate notes and the appropriate forms to continue to be ill. I have been textbook appropriate.
And, appropriately enough, the department manager has called me every morning to tell me what time to be at work that day.

DM: "Um.... you know you're scheduled to work the fairy floss cart today at 10 AM, right? You'll be there, right?"
Me: "DM, I told you this yesterday, and the day before.... I filled out the forms and stuff, my return-to-work date is the 5th."
DM: "The what? The 5th? The 5th of what? What?"
Me: "Check the paperwork, it's all there. She made six copies. They can't all be lost."
DM: "Oh... here it is. The 5th? Are you sure? This shows a rather disrespectful attitude, to be absent so long, you know...."
Me: "DM, the medication gives me diarrhea."
DM: "Um.... what?"
Me: "It gives me diarrhea. The mad poops. The skitters. The Hershey squirts. Spontaneous high colonic. Diarrhea."
DM: "Ummmmm.... oh, and this should keep you from working your shift?"
Me: "I'd think it would be more of a disrespectful attitude to be unable to control my bodily functions in front of the tourists, don't you?"
DM: "Um.... what?"
Me: "See you on the 5th, DM."

PS... he called me again this morning. We had almost exactly the same conversation.... again.
I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm going to take the phone into the bathroom with me and give him a play-by-play.

Yes, More

I know I told myself I wasn't going to blog about my ridiculous workplace anymore. "Self", I said in a rather scoldy way, "you know you're going to wind up one of those boring bloggers who does nothing but whine and complain about their job until readers are shrieking at their monitors for you to "JUST FUCKING QUIT WHINING AND COMPLAINING ABOUT YOUR JOB, ALREADY!" and they'll be right... abusive of the caps lock key, but right nonetheless."
As per usual, I have ignored the good advice of Self because, dammit, there's gold in them thar bloggy hills.
I also cannot believe I've used the word "blog" so many times in such a short space, but it's late and I'm on some lovely sinus medication so there ya go. Send in the redundancy police again.
So anyway.....
Where the hell was I?
Oh yeah....

Last night, I came out of work to discover someone had rearranged my car. To be specific, they'd managed to completely remove my passenger side mirror. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt and say maybe they didn't notice, what with the screaming toddlers and the pressing need to get back on the road to Bugfuck, Idaho before their tourist visa runs out, but they'd also taken the time to stop, pick up the amputated mirror, and lay it nicely in the center of my windshield.
Livid does not adequately describe my state of mind at finding this. I can firmly credit my continued devotion to "Deadwood" for my creative use of the word "cocksucker".
So I went and had it replaced (thank you, dealership, for the complete hoovering of my bank account) and like a good little worker bee, called the security office at work to file a report.

Me: "Uh, hi, yeah, my car was vandalized last night in the parking lot and I wondered if I should call in a report on it to you?"
Security Guy: "That is the proper procedure, sir or ma'am. What was the nature of the vandalization? Was it keyed? Spray painted? Broken into? Windows shattered?"
Me: " My passenger side mirror was knocked off and placed on my windshield."
SG: "Do what?"
Me: "Someone hit my passenger side mirror hard enough to break it completely off, then left it on my windshield."
SG: *assuming a very lecturey, "you-naughty-naughty-girl" tone* "That is NOT vandalism. That is what we in the business call 'simple damage'."
Me: "Simple damage."
SG: "Yes, simple damage."
Me: "So what counts as complex damage? Do they have to blow up the car, or can they just burn it to the ground?"
SG: *deep sigh of the Specialist In The Know When Dealing With The Poor Dumbass Civilians* "Well, if it would make you feel better I can write it up in The Notebook."
Me: " Uh huh. And what happens then?"
SG: "Then I put the notebook back under the wobbly leg of the desk. "
Me: "Okay..... well, let's go ahead and write it up anyway, just for fun."
SG: "But it's NOT vandalism. You can't go around saying stuff like that. It's not right. It makes us here at The Bigass Amusement Park Security Squad look bad."
Me: "Oh god."
SG: "Now, what kind of car is it?"
Me: "A Saturn."
SG: "How do you spell that?"

That Poor Horse

I hate to keep beating a dead horse, returning to the same well, dancing on the same lap harping on it, but I cannot understand my coworkers.
Yes, they speak English for the most part but its the context that confuses me. We are not only never on the same page, we're in entirely different books.

To whit: Yesterday I was asked to train a new worker in the vast intricacies of fairy floss cart. I gave him the physical basics..... ask the customer what they'd like, get the fairy floss, serve the fairy floss... we didn't even touch on the whole confusing cash register business.

The abysmally low high points of our time together:
1. He refused to tell me the proper pronounciation of his name (it was a very ethnic variant that I'd never seen before) yet would snap at me "That ain't it!" when I'd miss the target.
2. Whenever this particular sweet young newbie from another stand would wander by, he would disappear in that direction for at least a quarter of an hour.
3. He gave away fairy floss to any teenage girl who batted her lashes at him before I told him it was coming out of his check.
4. When I mentioned, as he stood in a pile of sugar sprinklings that nearly buried his sneakers, that when it gets that bad we sweep it up, as he'd seen me do several times previous, he replied, with open scorn, "Men don't sweep. That's women's work."
5. He had only three questions:
a: When did he get a raise?
b: When did he get to leave?
c: When could he "control" the cash register?

Yes, I can hear some of you.... he's just behaving like a typical teenager at a measly part-time job. And no, I didn't take his head off at the sweeping comment. I doubt if I had that he'd have missed it, as unused as it was.
But this is the stupidity of it all: as far as he knew, because he was never told differently, I was his manager, not another coworker.

I kind of doubt I'll be seeing Mr. Unpronouncable again anytime soon. The real manager asked me later for a precis of our time together. And I'm just too old to lie.

For those of you who think I'm just randomly bitching in these rants... okay, yeah, you got me. But it's not only bitchery. It's real and true amazement at the complete generational discrepancies. I feel like an anthropologist washed up on some exotic shore.... Teenybopper Isle.
And it's a scary place.

Calling In Sick

So yesterday I had a little headache when I went in to work. One of my coworkers asked why I looked so un-cheerful.
"Oh" I said. "Got a bit of a headache."
Then, as I do everything, I decided to turn it into a joke....

"Or maybe" I continued, "I have Ebola."
Dead silence all around.
"Uh...." spoke up one bright young hope for our future. "What's Ebola?"
Me: "It's that disease, the one that started with monkeys, that's very very deadly... makes all your organs turn to mush and your blood just explode out of you."
More dead silence.
Coworker:"You're makin' that up."
Me: "No, I'm NOT. There was even a movie about it. With Dustin Hoffman."
Coworker:"Who?"
Me: "Dustin Hoffman. He was in "Tootsie"..... "Rain Man"... oh c'mon. "
Coworker:"He's that retarded guy, right?"
Other coworker: "Maybe that earbowl-ah made him retarded. "
Coworker: "Ooooh, yeah dawg, disease can do that."
Other coworker: "Yeah, cos my cousin had a real high temp and it cooked his brain and now he's all special."
Me: "Only your cousin?"

It's Not the Point, It's the Pain In My Ass

Yes, as I have been informed many times, my work hours are not that onerous. Clock in around 10:00AM, clock out around 4:00PM. But seeing as how this is an amusement park environment, and there is no designated employee parking, and the park itself is easily as large as Iowa, and speaking of Iowa, my work space is on the other side of the park so it's like out in Dogballs, Iowa or something* So in order to find a parking space and trot over to the luxurious employee lounge** and swipe my timecard through the Slot That Pays,*** I must leave home at least an hour early, depending on what the Eye In The Sky Traffic Copter**** says the drive will be like. And the drive home invariably incorporates three fender-benders, two stalled pickup trucks from Tijuana in the fast lane, and a partridge in a pear tree getting a ticket and forcing, yes, FORCING I tell you, everyone to slow to five miles an hour and watch because no one, yes, NO ONE has ever seen someone getting a ticket before and who knows, it could be Ponch or John handing it out and we ALL want to see a star, don't we? Well, DON'T WE?
Coffee.... sip coffee, breathe deep. Ah... mental equilibrium restored.
So let's say my real hours are 9:00AM to 5:30PM. Still reasonable, you say, Mr. or Ms. Sit At A Desk In A Clean, Quiet Building Without Screaming Toddlers Surrounding You, Unless You Work In A Preschool And Then You Dug Your Own Grave Sister, YOU Lie In It.
And therein lies the crux of the matter. Toddlers. Children. Tots. Kids. Wee folk. The little ones. Everywhere I look.
Now, let me ask you, what kind of a sick parent and/or guardian figure brings a CHILD to an AMUSEMENT PARK ENVIRONMENT? I ask you?
Oh..... yeah, I get your point. Where the hell were YOU when I was filling out the application, you Monday Morning Quarterback Hindsight Is 20/20 Person you?
My exposure to the vast population of Mommy and Daddy's Pride and Joy thus far has been quick glimpses of nieces, nephews, and cousins at family reunions, all of which could be escaped, given enough Jack and Coke. Or those untrained ill-behaved hordes who populate Wal-Mart. Apparently these go to Amusement Parks in their off hours. In packs. Slobbering, shrieking packs.
And they all want fairy floss. Cotton candy. Kiddy crack. Call it what you will.
Yesterday, a wee little bit of incipient manhood threw himself at my stand and asked for, nay, DEMANDED that I give him treats. I informed him it would cost $2.59 for said demanded treat. He gave me the Evil Eye, Junior Division, and again demanded his treat. I took the hardline, much as the Teletubbies on my training video recommended I do, and demanded payment.
This little angel of the playground KICKED my treatcart, stared me in the eye, and snarled "BITCH!" and then ran off into the crowd.
I had to call over a coworker to cover the stand so I could take a break, as I was laughing too hard to continue the highly technical task of fairy floss production. Damn near wet myself, I did.
I worked six days in a row last week. I have six more this week. Today is my day off. And what am I doing? Going to my OTHER semi-part-time job cleaning apartments. Man, am I a glutton for punishment or what? Especially since I just learned I settled on a flat rate that is approximately 1/3 of the going rate, but let's not talk about that now. It makes me weep like a toddler denied fairy floss.
The point is..... shit, what was my point? I had a point, I really really did. Where did I leave it? Oh, there it is. I'm sitting on it. Ouch.
The point is, I'm dead tired. Therefore, blogging will be light. Don't say I didn't warn yez.

*That's always been our family's designation for a place at the outer end of nowhere... Dogballs, Iowa. Second cousin to the traditional Bumfuck, Egypt.
**Two square feet between the wet foods dumpster and the pile of rotting cardboard boxes.
***Yes, it's early enough that it this phrase makes me giggle like a titillated schoolgirl.
****Who I suspect is really just a radio station intern reading off traffic averages stats in front of a shaky microphone while pounding on his own chest, because the station I listen to is too damn cheap to even HAVE an Eye In The Sky Traffic Copter. Maybe an Eye In The Sky Traffic Pigeon With A Kodak Instamatic or something.
*****We've replaced LeeAnn's asterisk key with Folger's Crystals... let's see if she notices!

Listening For the Hoofbeats

I had my first real wear-the-nametage, punch-the-timeclock workday at the new job today.
And absolutely nothing, repeat NOTHING, blogworthy happened.
I know, I know....
I'm very disappointed myself.
I might even have to (dare I say it?) start something myself tomorrow.
*insert evil cackle and air-washing of hands here*