Last Wednesday night shift at the Craft Center.

We lost some folks from our group of five. One girl had something to go to last week, but just plain didn't show up without explanation this week. Another girl said she'd only volunteered in order to get free lab time and she'd hardly used the lab, and it'd be better to get a paying job anyway, so she is quitting. She went home early.

So in the end, it was my manager, K, the lone guy on shift, M, and me, plus K's mom.

I am kind of bummed at K's leaving, mainly because she's very cool and I only just met her and now she's leaving for who knows how long. She's been a lot of fun to work with, and we all know I've loved her no-potluck policy. I found out last night that part of that was because she went to a poor high school where she literally could not eat lunch without some stranger coming up to her and begging her for her food. So she's not into sharing food with others. I can relate to that.

There weren't a whole lot of people around on the last day of school, so we kind of partied. K's mom brought in chocolate cake and claimed we must all be getting high off of somebody's (I don't know what the hell craft he was doing, actually) fumes, and claimed the apple cider she'd brought in would get K really hyper. This apparently worked! We put on music and danced. We watched silly animation online. We played Uno. K broke out the center's Polaroid camera.

I'll have to explain the Polaroids: one of the Official Managers of the center, all of which I rarely see because they don't work nights, likes to take Polaroids of people. For reasons unfathomable to me, she takes pictures of ceramics people who clean their buckets well and posts them on the wall. She also takes random pictures of the staff and puts them on the wall, as some kind of odd psuedo-made-up-award or something. For example, one of the girls that works Wednesday afternoons (there's a half-hour shift overlap, so I work with her technically for a half hour, and she's hung out with us for hours afterwards while waiting for her class to start) said to me, "Jan took my picture today and I have no idea why." Well, working on nights usually means this picture thing is not an issue for me.

Well, not today.

Another thing I'll have to explain is the "K and M Show." A la Itchy and Scratchy, K and M have this relationship where M plays many a prank/makes many a joke about K, and it's very slapstick. I'm going to miss watching the K and M show, because it's a hoot. Anyway, the K and M show started tonight because M had hurt his foot playing soccer too hard or something, and K started complaining that his bandaged foot stank. So naturally M starts waving his foot as close as he can to K, which led somehow to them both getting ahold of the bottle of disinfecting soapy crap and M pouring the stuff into his Birkenstocks. K felt compelled to take a Polaroid of this event, which led in turn to her taking a startled Polaroid of me going, "Oh shit, there's a camera?", which led in turn to M taking a few Polaroids of K trying to dodge the camera. All are now up on the wall, with M's feet captioned with remarks about their stinkiness. My caption was "Jen the wonderful" (awww, *blush*), "Oh s***, there's a camera?". K's, labeled by M, was "K's last night, we got her really stoned!"

The K and M show went on. I couldn't think of the word for disinfectant and ended up referring to the bottle as the "bottle of crap," which inspired K to go make a sign and LABEL it the "Bottle of Cr*p." K's mom kept reading that as "You labeled it Bottle of Crop." M got ahold of the BoC and started squirting K with it long-distance across the center, and chasing her around with the bottle while she squealed. When she went out to pee, he quietly added some more of it to her backpack straps.

Yeah, we had a good juvenile time. We didn't want to leave after our shift was over, and hung around gossiping for a long time after all the cleaning had been done. When we walked out, M and I said to each other that it's just not going to be the same without K around.

previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry