You know, I already expected that my
ever-empathetic employer was going to have me work on my
birthday. To add insult to their apathy, however, they've scheduled me to be there til
3:30AM (which is way, way off from my schedule template). Feh.
Today is apparently Employee Appreciation Day. I'm not sure if this is a
nationwide thing, or just a Postal Service or
federal government thing. Anyway,
in honor of this sacred event, they bought a hundred or so dollars worth of
pizza. Wow, I really feel appreciated now. (Of course, I have the day off today anyway, so I don't get any. I just know about it because the
supervisors were announcing it once every half-hour for the entire seven hours I was there
yesterday.)
I had a spontaneous
nosebleed near the end of my shift. This is actually worrying me a bit; it's at least the second time in the last week or so that I've had a nosebleed for no apparent reason. I raced by two supervisors, saying I would be idle for a few minutes, "for obvious reasons". Apparently, they weren't so obvious to everyone, as one of them stopped me and asked why. The fact that I had
blood smeared on my hands and face wasn't a big enough clue, I guess.
I felt really woozy afterward. Strange, because I don't think I really lost that much blood. It also reminded me of that episode of the short-lived
Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert is the only employee eligible to give blood for the drive, so they take all of his to meet the
quota ("Driving without blood is surprisingly difficult!"). So I'm sitting at a terminal with blood on my hands, giggling to myself for no apparent (to anybody else) reason. I'm sure that looked good.
On a completely unrelated note, I'm reading Douglas Amy's
Real Choices / New Voices. It sounds like an exceptionally bad
Lifetime special or something, but it's really an argument for instituting a
proportional representation electoral system in the U.S. (and, presumably, in the other nations that still use
single-member plurality systems - or in the case of
Australia, single-member
majority). Frankly, it hasn't yet told me anything I don't already know, but we'll see. I also checked out Miller's
Community, Market and State (which deals with market
socialism) and a book by one of my
professors, Richard Dagger, called
Civic Virtues (which is, I believe, an argument for communitarianism). No, I'm not reading that to "score points" with my prof, I don't even plan on him knowing I'm reading it.
And I apparently have two days to send my gift for
E2 Secret Santa 2003 before I'm considered a deadbeat. Whoops. I've had the stuff together for over a week now, I've just been lazy about getting it sent out.
Tomorrow.