As if the day couldn't get any worse...

Hellish time at work today: I got stuck bagging for the fastest cashier in the store, the one whom the guys hate bagging for, and considering the fact that I'm no quicker at bagging than most of the guys, you can imagine that I was really run ragged. Add that it was a busy, rainy Saturday and that there's a dumb football game on tonight, so everyone was buying junk for their Patriots game parties... And it's a full moon, which brings all the crazies out, including the people who insist that I make the bags light, the people who insist on paper bags, even when it's splonking rain out there, the parents with the bouncy children who fling the bags around and wreck the contents (including one little demon who slammed a gallon bottle of milk onto a bag of grapes; fortunately, the mother was good-natured and was clearly trying to teach her son the laws of cause and effect. Said the mom, "It's okay: he'll just have to eat squished grapes for a week." I could have kissed that lady.), and people who tell me what kind of facial expression to have; I was a little flustered after a long row of paper-in-plastic-don't-make-the-bags-heavy people, when this fussy old bird came through with her wierd set of demands. I must have really started to get flustered-looking, because she said, "Don't you give me that kind of look." She narrowly missed getting an ultra-close-up of me biting her nose off, in which she'd have to look right into my fire-blazing eyes. Instead, she got a view of the top of my head as I bent over my work to hide the tears I couldn't keep from sliding out of the corners of my eyes.

Then to cap things off, "Bubba", the town's pervert, the middle-aged nut with the mentality of a horny thirteen-year-old, had to come in and hang around and ogle everything in sight with two X chromosomes. Including me. The Frenchman let "Bubba" stay in for about an hour, since it was raining, but of course, the uninvited guest had to overstay his welcome. Thank God that Constantine and Flood decided to co-front (three minds in one forebrain, yey...), or else I would have run screaming out of the store. Constantine was casting sections of the Ritualis Romanorum, in case the intruder was carrying any intruders of a different kind, and Flood helped me get into full "iceberg impersonation" mode. That served me well, since for some wierd reason during the very rare lulls, "Bubba" took it into his head to keep walking up and down the lane where I was working, which made it impossible for me to collect the overstock people had jammed onto the magazine and gum racks. Finally, as he walked through again, and as one of the supervisors was taking care of a pick-up at the next register, I said to the cashier (a different girl than the speed demon), "Of all the registers he could walk through, it has to be the one I'm working at. That jerk tried to grope me at a bus stop some time ago." I think that may have got the point across to management, since "Bubba" left the premesis shortly afterward. I hope they permanently get the point across and ban that creep from the place: he's been banned from the Wal-Mart here for trying to grope a cashier there and for harrassing customers, and there was a restraining order on him in the old store that used to be in the same plaza where I work, because guess what he used to do at the old store? Yep, play grab-ass with the cashiers.

EDITED TO ADD: I would also like to hunt down the "Enquireer" reporters and beat them repeatedly on the head with a rock for making this weeks' headline all about the "coverup" in the Sago mining disaster and the fact that they plastered the front page with a picture of that poor guy who survived that catastrophe. All I can say is: Have. You. People. Not. A. Single. Frocking. Ounce. Of. Shame? Let that man's family have something remotely resembling seclusion and privacy to care for him and to prepare for a very uncertain future. I don't know if there was a "coverup", except maybe for the mining owners failing to cover their own asses and letting dangerous conditions go unmended for too damn long. Why does everything have to be woo-woo conspriacy theory gack?!

And I come home to find that one of my favorite LJ-friends "__flood" (another of those rara aves in terra, a fan of the Merv's snarky second-in-command) has deleted his LJ. God, I'll miss him...

::Off to take a bath::