thediastema's Diaryland Diary

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His body was covered in coke fizz. I expect a dry-cleaning bill in my inbox tomorrow.

All I feel at liberty to say about Spuds' departure from PTC is that it has indeed happened, and we're all handling it okay, but it's cast a new, weird glare on everything I do in front of Ginger, and it's forcing me to pick a story to believe.

I don't really think I should talk about it here any more.

~~

Having thus permitted myself to think about something else, I feel it only rational to inform everybody:

Heh. Yes. We have touched each other.

And how.

It happened like this:

I am working Concessions last night, carrying around a courtesy cup on which I'd scribed the obscure phrase, "Joey Was Framed!" It is full of Coke, a refreshing beverage I very much enjoy. Polly and Four-Eyes (whom I'd given a comp Coke earlier in the day, without incident) are working neighbouring windows in the office. They beckon me over to the office in near-unison. I ask timidly if I'm in some kind of trouble. Four smirks and affirms.

Apparently I'm not in trouble, though; they just want me to remind them what Ginger's name is. I say it's [Ginger], and Four finds the whole thing very amusing because in his day, Concessions was run by a woman with a name that sounded just like Ginger.

I call him a spaz and threaten to throw my coke at him.

Knowing I won't, he chucks at me the yellow stress ball with which we were playing a silent, rather intense game of "catch" the other day. It hits my drink and creates a small-scale tsunami. He titters like the pantywaist he is.

"You're goin' DOWN, [funny WASPy last name]," say I. I charge at the door to the Cage, which is unlocked but being held shut by the 160-pound-soaking-wet type frame of a giggling blond 22-year-old in a pair of coke bottle glasses. I finally manage to get into the Cage and chase him down with my carbonated warfare. I flick several millilitres into his face, and he keeps giggling like a schoolgirl and trying to defend his bespectacled visage with one of our office slinkies. (Slinkies, you'll note, do not make good umbrellas.)

Somewhere in there, it happens.

The edge of his palm brushes the tip of my right ring finger, and for about one picosecond it terrifies us both.

I declare victory and, shotgunning the rest of my beverage, flee the office.

He hits me with the yellow ball again, fired carefully through his window. I fire it back and it richochets off the bars. He laughs at me. I grab the ball and bolt for the office door again, and the two of us lean violently against it laughing like a pair of pot-smoking mongoloids while I try and jam it through the impossibly small crack of the door into his right eyeglass lens.

By this point, patrons are starting to go, "Well, I NEVER!" If HRH were here our asses would be in matching slings. But we persist. He mocks my inability to persuade the door that far open. I call him a spoiled little towhead and yell mockingly, "I don't like you!"

Yeah, I'm playing my cards sooo close to my chest. (Idiot.)

Within the next hour we'll both mischarge a patron one way or another, and he'll also call me over to his window to inform me with a smile that I'm "in big trouble!" This will instigate an argument over who "started it" lasting well beyond what's supposed to be the end of his shift.

~~

As if by intuition, on the other side of the planet, Dimples will compose an e-mail within mere hours of the incident. It won't indicate so much as the last few that she's still not one hundred per cent over him, but I'll still feel like a traitor and a fool.

~~

Also last night, Ginger told me I had bubbles popping above my head.

~~

In addition an incredibly funny roundtable discussion took place, including the worried-looking New Guy, a benign blond kid on the edge of 21 whom we shall call "Elder Totally Harmless." I'm waiting for the reports from him and her before I post my own, because my mind was somewhere else and I don't want to forget anything.

~ETK

"Look what you've done!" --Polly, mock-scolding us for splattering coke on the Com-Tek Hearing Assistance Device rental forms. She knows she loved it.

16:09 - 08 December, 2002

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