The day started off ... interesting. I started out on the phones until the monitor who's going to be retiring come November came and dragged me off the phones, as I was supposed to be monitoring. In that time, though, one of the resident chicks managed to offend me fairly badly.

( How to offend me: )

( There's this woman at work. )

This gem of a woman is warm, caring, fun-loving, light-hearted ... and has utterly crass taste in political cartoons. I'd been showing her the workplace cartoons I do, and I guess she felt compelled to return the favor or something. She managed to find a newspaper clipping cartoon featuring a posterized-to-black-and-white photo of the Shrubbery on the telephone. While I, like Trent Reznor and MTV, would have found that offensive enough by itself, this one managed to do one better? worse? with the caption, ( which is not for the queasy of stomach. ) I restrained my first impulse to rip the filthy thing to shreds, and instead returned it with a little note featuring a frowny face with several exclamation points, and the written comment, "That was not funny."

Directly as I finished up with passing that down, I was summoned to monitor. One of my first few reports was the infamous blasphemy on an open line moment. This was, amazingly enough, the late-teens son of Laser Mom -- shall he now be called Crusty Cake Kid? What with that and other moments in the monitor report, I soon enough found myself heading for the copy room to pick up the bad monitor report from the printer. On my way to Stressy College Chick's desk, I detoured to my older clone's desk, and asked if she could reach me "that blue thing in the cubby there". I left the monitor report -- and the nerf-bat -- on Stressy College Chick's desk, as she was out. Sadly, Laser Mom was not in, or I would have deputized her and handed her the bat.

I started getting a headache shortly after this. I could hear that someone, somewhere, was playing with one of these. ( For those not familiar with them... ) The headache built to critical mass, and I popped out of my monitor room and told the two punks down at the end of the row of booths next to the monitor room to put that thing away.

( And the fun just keeps on coming. )

But the blasphemy moment, which managed to make Cute Desk Guy do a very interesting double-take, almost makes up for that entire mess. I'll be really interested to see Laser Mom's take on it tomorrow. She can borrow the nerf-bat.


( Footnote. )