it's freaking the middle of NOVEMBER and i don't have to wear a coat. yesterday and fri must have been in the high 60's, mid 70's. wow. it was great. i think we skipped winter and have moved right back into spring. i wouldn't mind that one bit. except on christmas. i like snow around christmas. though i don't know how well snow around christmas will work out for me this year. i have to drive down to abilene, TX on the 20th of december. one of my good good friends is getting married and i've been planning to go to this wedding for a year and a half. snow isn't really conducive to good driving, in case you hadn't heard. so i'm not sure how this will work. i guess i will just keep an eye on the weather the week before and choose the states i drive through depending on the probability for snow. hmmm.

so my manager and i closed the store last night. i should should preface the rest of this paragraph by saying that i've only had two real jobs in my life: this one at starbucks and one as a computer page at the omaha public library during my junior and senior years of high school. when i applied for a job there i thought it would be the best thing in the world. i used to go to the library several times a week, just to read and check email and other like things. so this computer page position would be a chance for me to get paid doing what i was already doing. all i had to do was aide "patrons" (as opposed to "customers") with their computer questions and problems. problems usually involved the pushing of the on/off button on the CPU when it was frozen beyond repair. questions usually involved how to make the font bold on a word document. so you can see on most days this was not a very demanding job. i putzed around, did a lot of reading, did a lot of chatting with friends, not so much real work. except my manager there had this thing about keyboards. in a public library where they get a lot of use, keyboards get really dirty and gross. so she put me in charge of making sure that all the keyboards in the place were cleaned. until i came this job had never really been performed by anyone else. you could say i was the pioneer of keyboard cleaning. and this isn't a no-brainer task, contrary to what you might think. because if you've ever tried to clean a keyboard you know that while you may be able to scrub down the tops of the keys, it's very nearly impossible to get to the sides without popping the keys off, which you NEED to do anyway because there is lots of stuff under the keys. lots of disgusting stuff. until i did this i never knew what lived underneath the keys on keyboards. small woodland animals make their homes in the depths of keyboards. i'm not making this up. and goo. there is goo in keyboards. i don't know if this is factory goo that is supposed to keep some of the larger keys limber, but it bears a suspiciously striking resemblance to earwax. i'm serious. you think i'm making this up, but i kid you not. EARWAX. once i think i found a child's tooth in a keyboard. i swear. boy scouts' honor. and it was my job to deal with filth such as this. which i guess i could handle. so i popped off all the keys. and the trick in popping them off is to: 1) try not to hit yourself in the eye and 2) arrange all the keys so you can put them back on in their respective places. sometimes it is rather funny to put keys in the wrong places for those people who look at their hands to type. because the natural tendency of the homo sapien is to think that the plastic key is really responsible for determining what letter will actually show up on the screen. when really it is just a label. but it's funny to see what people do. they think the computer is stupid. i didn't do this often, mind you, and when i did do it it wasn't on purpose, but so i digress. i will conclude this section with telling you how long it takes to thoroughly clean a dirty keyboard. ready for this? about TWO HOURS. pretty freaking insane right?

so the story above was going to lead to a comment about my old manager. she was this tiny middle-aged jewish woman, who couldn't have exceeded about five feet in height. she really was good to me as a high school-aged employee. she didn't treat me like i was five. but there were a couple things that freaked me out a little bit about her. first of all, she had this weird smell. it wasn't necessarily a bad smell. just weird. the closest thing that i could describe it as is lipstick. you know how lipstick smells? this woman smelled like she bathed in lipstick. secondly, she had this voice that reminded me of a witch. sometimes she would be having a conversation with someone in the back room and she would laugh and the entire library would be silenced by her cackle. it was just that freaky. so besides being scared by my boss, eventually i became bored out of my mind at the library after a year and a half of working there and i quit when i moved to chicago for college.

my manager at starbucks, on the other hand, is great. i had a great time closing with him yesterday. he told me a long time ago before he was a manager he and one of his fellow starbucks employees would joke around with customers about there being a "starbucks after hours," in which they served adult beverages and had dancers on the bar and, i thought perhaps as well, the pastry case. i mean don't visualize this, but the idea is just freaking hilarious. and apparently some customers actually believed that "starbucks after hours" existed. haha that is great.

so someday i will tell you more stories about the library. because you should know. i have funny stories from working there. until then, have a good sunday evening. and don't do anything i wouldn't do.