I’m having a Duck in the Shooting Gallery Day—the kind where I make a lot of trips back and forth for things I’ve forgotten, hoping no one fires.
It started when I arrived in my department and discovered I’d forgotten something in my car. I grabbed my keys, but remembered at the elevator that I’d need my badge to get back in the building, so I went back to get my badge . . . and realized inside the elevator that I didn’t have my keys anymore.
I’m off tomorrow and well aware of it, but I still tried to schedule training for our new intern tomorrow morning. Once with our Scheduling Queen, who is a wonderful person with whom I can’t adequately communicate even in my lucid moments,* and again five minutes later with the intern, whom I’m sure is feeling confident about being trained by someone who clearly has trouble grasping the fundamental concept of time.
I ran out of item donation forms, printed twenty copies of the wrong one, and then hacked a stack of the right ones apart with the paper-cutter like I was reenacting the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.**
After trying for ten minutes to get the catalog to cough up the record for a specific parochial school yearbook,*** I saw that I wasn’t misspelling the name of the saint, I was misspelling school. Five minutes and a few choice words after that, I figured out that I’d somehow set it to search for DVDs.
I’m adequately caffeinated, my sinuses are quiet, I had breakfast, and I’m not rushed or anything. And it’s not that my brain isn’t engaged, it just doesn’t have much traction.
So clearly, the majority of my brain cells are off doing something else today. I hope they’re working on the book and not succumbing to meningitis or trypanosomiasis or narcolepsy or pernicious hypochondria or something.
Maybe they’ll come back after lunch.
Or maybe I should go find them before they get me into even more trouble . . .
See you tomorrow.
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*We’re both bright people who speak the same language, work in the same department, have the same level of education, but for some reason, our respective transmitters and receivers don’t sync. When one of us says anything more complicated than, the sky is blue, the other one just doesn’t get it and feels dumb. Or we think the other person isn’t getting it, so we try again, except the other person did understand actually, for once, but couldn’t get that across, either and is now feeling patronized. And that’s on good days, when I’m not likely to walk up to her with my brain spinning in the sand and say that the sky is a rutabaga without my conscious knowledge.
** Yes, I did count my fingers afterwards. Always do.
***Either our catalog hates yearbooks or all of our cataloguers have. I’ve memorized their shelf locations in deference to my blood pressure, and if I didn’t need the OCLC number to process donations, I’d leave their records alone.
Earful of Cider 