In two short hours I'll be on my way out of here and onto a weekend of holiday insanity. I'm really looking forward to all of it, except the part where I have to clean the filthy house - I really need an army of Roombas and a couple of helper-monkeys. That would rule. One thing I'm not looking forward to is grocery shopping. I have to go buy a holiday week's worth of food today and I loathe a busy store. I know nobody likes it, but are you invisible? Because apparently I am. I cannot tell you how many times I get shoulder checked, cut in front of and plowed over during the average outing. It's as if I'm transparent. I know I�ve talked about this before but it never stops being freaking annoying and it's way worse during the holiday season.

I'm normally a great shopper of all things, it's something I really enjoy, but, (warning! Nerd metaphor coming up!) like the vampires on Buffy who take a holiday during Halloween, I avoid avoid avoid like crazy the shopping mall hell before Christmas. I don't care how good the deals are, it's not good enough for me. I do not shop well under duress so I did a lot of Internet shopping this year and it RULED.

I'm alone at work today and it's really sort of pointless to be here but they're giving us free pizza for lunch, so I'm not going anywhere until after I get my pizza. Then, because this place is awesome, I have the entire next week off work as an extra week of paid vacation. A few years ago I set a dangerous precedence by spending that entire week painting the kitchen. This year I might think about sanding the textured crap off the bathroom walls, but that doesn't mean I'll actually do it. We'll see.

*****

My sister's recent entry got me thinking about my current and previous employment. I started this journal because of a weird temp job because that kind of crazy just had to be documented. If you're a fairly new reader and have a few hours to kill, go back to the beginning and read my archives. You cannot make that stuff up. In retrospect, it really wasn't that bad at all, especially considering how bad things got when I left for a "real job" which turned out to be a complete nightmare. The only way it could have been worse is if my desk had been placed in the middle of a Wal-Mart store the day before Christmas Eve.

I don't ever talk about my current job because it's too good to be true most days. I'm so happy here that I don't want to mess it up. However, I've had a LOT of really odd jobs in the past- some good, some bad, that I feel like I haven't told you about. I'll tell you about two today.

The Bad:

The year before I met my husband, I worked for about six months at a small locally-owned neighborhood convenience store. This wasn't the worst job I ever had, but it came really close. I worked alone, often at night, and every night was the night I was sure I'd be robbed. Miraculously, I never was but a friend of mine who also worked there got held at knife point a month after I quit. I don't know why I thought this would be a good gig. What was wrong with me that I took that job? The owner was the most touchy-feely, paranoid dude I've ever met. He always wanted a kiss hello which was just so wrong and I don't know why I ever put up with it. I'm southern! I'm not supposed to make a scene! In retrospect I wonder if perhaps he was a cokehead. He had crazy mood swings and was always convinced his employees were ripping him off. He was probably right.

Mostly it was just sort of dismal and I had to deal with some really lovely people from the neighborhood. One guy was always trying to buy things on credit. (No). One weird guy came in after he got off work every night and bought junk food, chewing tobacco and porn. (Which never failed to crack me up.) Kids were always trying to buy beer with fake IDs. (If you can't pronounced Schenectady, you're probably not from there, kid.) One woman hated me for absolutely no reason I could ever figure out. (This still bugs me. What did I do?) Generally I was nice to people and they were nice to me but I was probably a little more guarded with the male customers because, duh. This didn't go over well with the owner and he demanded that I be more outgoing, more friendly. I demanded that he find another employee.

The Good:

In high school I scored a job at the Byrd Theatre. It's a cool old theater built in 1928 and after a solid week's campaign of bugging the manager, he relented and hired me on as a concession counter flapper girl (and later a floor manager.) I stayed for five and a half years and in some ways it was one of the best jobs I'd ever had. It paid shit, but I got lots of cool cred just by working there. I was one of the mysterious "Byrd Girls" and I got to wear an assortment of real and fake flapper costumes. It helped that I also worked part time for a vintage clothing store, so I got first pick of the best dresses.

The best thing about the job, other than my insanely cooler than me coworkers, was having run of the place. I loved that theatre like it was a person. I got to hang out in the balcony, smoke on the mezzanine level (closed to the public back then, yo), sneak around in the basement to check out the natural spring the theater was built over, hang out in the projection booth, and one year I got to watch fireworks from the roof.

Most cherished memories include: watching a co-worker streak through a packed house on Christmas night, having an informal wake late one night in the lobby for the beloved manager who died tragically young, playing rummy and smoking on the stairs while the movie played, dancing and singing along to Dick Tracy in the lobby, hating Pretty Woman with every fiber in my being. (It ran for four and a half months!!!1) I quit that job in 1994 but people still occasionally recognize me as a former Byrd Girl. I really miss it sometimes.

Happy Holidays, monkeys! I hope you guys have a great weekend.

3 chatty monkeys