thediastema's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Official results are in: Four-Eyes will outlast All My Cookies by one week. Master, I was at PTC from 12:30 to about 10:15 on Saturday. It was beautiful, due largely in part to the presence of the Three Men I Admire Most. I didn't expect it to turn out that way. I woke after about three hours' sleep and only had time to get down about a quarter of a pot of coffee in between laundering my uniform, bathing, grooming, dressing and jamming contact lenses into my eyes. The drive up to campus was a bigger mess than I was; turnout-challenged SUVs loaded with rabid football fans clogged my route to work. I flashed my special-events permit to the lot attended and steered into a coveted PMT parking space just under the wire and made a beeline for the employee door, my wet hair sticking out behind me in an elastic-bound wad. The instant I entered the lobby, usher vest half-slung over my shoulder blades, HM announced that the lift was broken again. Broken just in time, it's worth noting, for Saturday Matinee, otherwise known as The Show To Which Lots and Lots of Old People Come. The result was a frazzled HM scrambling all over the place trying to seat people with canes who had purchased economy seats. Working in a theatre lobby, you learn not to cross a feisty octogenarian with a cane. Another fun aspect of BrokenElevatorPalooza '01 was the challenge of bringing upstairs two 50-cup coffee pots, a basket of candy, a few hundred paper cups, two tills and a moneybag, and...the last All My Cookies cookies we were ever going to see. More on them by and by. Al and I shared main-entrance ticket-marking duties while Fisher and New Girl 3 (whose name is...well, the same as mine; what's a good alias for that?) manned the easier, lighter-traffic south door. I love Al to bits. It's clear to everybody. I catch HM remarking about it all the time in a manner that clearly indicates he doesn't understand that 15-year-old boys are not a romantic interest for the average pushing-20 female. Then again, Al joins HM, Scott and Stud in the long list of male coworkers I've been accused of picturing naked. Come to think of it, the only charge nobody's brought against me (except for Scott, at a time and place well outside of his employment) is being smitten with Four-Eyes. If an irony's worth ten thousand spoons, that must be the knife I feel in my heart today. It came about thus: a lot of parties came in segments today, the early people leaving tickets with me for their late-arriving companions. In the last few minutes before curtain, I'm willing to bet I was at the Will-Call Window every thirty seconds handing back envelopes to Four-Eyes and New Guy A., whom we'll now dub "Durwood." Four introduced us, in his way. I let them both know that, with another E. on the staff, they were welcome to call me Di, for Diastema, like everybody else does. I'm not sure how well the joke went over. ~~ Al and I got around once more to the thought question, "assume you have to take the lift at PTC and your odds of ever coming out of it are slim. You get to take one album, one person, and one drink. What do you choose?" The readership are welcome to answer this mini-survey in their own respective diaries, journals and 'blogs. I could think up a dozen scenarios which I'd find equally enjoyable, but I didn't even tell Al the best one. ~~ I only have a week left in which to keep this ridiculous secret. I found out this afternoon. I loitered, clocked-out, in the lobby, because H'ton was so low on petrol I didn't want to bother stopping at home. Al went in to watch his mother's show for the six zillionth time. HM perambulated in a frenzy trying to get the elevator working again. I stopped in the Cage window occupied by Molly 2.0 (the Cage is doubling up on names, too). M2 is a delightful creature who worked the summer campaign with me. Today she had a ballet-related leg injury, which made a great conversation piece. We also talked about the upcoming closing week and, thereafter, my travels to Hollywood with Ursula and Sporfa. We didn't actively exclude Four-Eyes, but I didn't want to pester him. He'd been lying on his back, holding a book between himself and the light. That said, he got to talking with us a little. By and by HM came around as well. "When's your last day?" M2 asked Yuppiecakes, just as I was about to finally put together the gumption to ask him myself. "Next Saturday." We talked about Cage life, Campaign life, and Concessions life. He noted he'd worked the latter his first year, which amused M2. "Did you two work together?" We shook our heads. "O, no. He was...long before my time." "Not long before!" "Yeah," HM piped up, "you kind of grew up with Four-Eyes, didn't you?" I nodded. "End of an era." I turned to A. F. Bespectacled. "You're a legend over in Concessions, by the way." "Don't take that entirely as a compliment," HM warned him. "So you've heard lots of stories about [young Four-Eyes] and [the Scotts to his Di]?" "Well, they're not still around, so...just you, really." He seemed mildly surprised by this. HM said something like, "Wait 'til you're gone, [Four]. That's when the rumours will really start flying." "Actually," I ventured, "that's why I'm staying on as long as I am." (How long's that gonna be? Hell if I know.) "Furthermore it's why I schedule every shift. That way I'm always around and nobody can talk about me." "Well, closing weekend you'll be fair game, then, won't you?" HM smirked. It's amazing. He knows me best of just about anyone on staff, and he doesn't know the half of it. ~~ I talked a while yet with the Cage People on duty because there was a considerable gap (heh!) between the shifts. HM announced he'd energized himself with an orange juice. I scoffed and told him I had to introduce him to my friend, black coffee. Four immediately backed me up. "I'd say coffee's much better than juice. I'd love to see [Dr. Evil] on coffee." "Heh! Me, too." HM shook his head and rolled his eyes at us. Older than the two of us put together, he'd already had his "coffee days" during a simpler time. Four and I exchanged smirks. He spoke: "Or we could just go straight to speed and see what that does to him." Please stop being so hilarious and mischievous. I'm trying to gore you out of my heart with a spork, here. I wished I'd done more of this Cage groupie business in the past couple of seasons. Who knows what wonderful drugs we could have tested on our common mentor? I should have started long ago. Either that or stayed the hell away from them today, because now it's going to be a million times harder to let him go. ~~ All My Cookies is now a memory. I went off on a comic tirade about it and deliberately got myself choked up to amuse my coworkers. The good news: it worked. The bad news: I watched Four-Eyes take the first bite of his last AMC cookie ever. I was legitimately bawling by the time I got to the parking lot. ~ETK 15:29 - 29 September, 2001 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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