Recreational work

So I've been meaning to record some of my day-to-day happenings at my part-time job (front desk at a recenter) for a while now. I've been there for 4 months now, and every day I could write a good few paragraphs about the crazy things people say and do and what's going through the mind of my relatively reserved self when I encounter it.

I usually work pretty consistently 6am-11 or 12 three or four days a week. My supervisor was always Derek, and I always worked with the same front desk volunteers: Lee, Roberta, Skip, and Anna. Ken didn't work the FD but I saw him twice a week TR. But since the new school year's started up (most of the FD are in school), schedules are desperately shifting. Vince, who pretty consistently works the 6am shifts when I'm not, has classes in the morning. Alex, who used to work most of the evenings, has shipped off to Australia. And so now I'm doing from 6am's and 11am's and to 8pm's and catching up with volunteers and managers I haven't talked to since September when I started.

For the past week or so we've been chasing a mouse. I came into work one morning and the door to the back desk was shut with more than the usual 1-2 people behind it. It was strange because everyone who works at the recenter (everyone, from volunteers and FD and instructors) go through the back. I thought there was some kind of hush-hush manager's meeting going on. I asked what was up, and someone said that there was a mouse. I thought they were just trying to make me go away.

So we've had a lot of shut doors this week. First the back office, and then the other day I heard some shouting and then I couldn't get into the storage/mail room.

The last time there was a mouse at the front desk, it was dead, and I was a volunteer. It was a Saturday morning when I worked 8a-12 every week to get free gym access. The managers were trying to get Jessica (FD then, now a FD manager) worked up, so they invited her to check out what was in this gift bag. And in the gift bag was a dead mouse. She screamed. I asked what in there, and as they were laughing at her loud reaction and extending the bag for me to get in at the joke, I felt sad for the little thing. Mice are actually pretty cute and furry (I'd seen one at the recenter at my alma mater; it jumped from the 2nd floor to the 1st floor, and lived to skitter away to a safe corner somewhere away from stomping tennis shoes).

They caught the mouse yesterday; how--I don't know. I asked Derek and he described something about pouring the mouse into a drip coffee machine and turning it on brew or something like that... I didn't catch his whole story but it was made up anyway (I'm sure it was a good one) and I just wanted to know if it was alive and they'd let the little thing go into the wild.
FEBRUARY 2012