Things to Do at Work

Ah, the workplace. A realm filled with people, tasks to do, and the mystery of where that puddle in the corner came from. A spill, perhaps? Did someone mop, and somehow the excess liquid collected in a dip in the floor? Is there an invisible crack in the wall that leaked water?

But I digress. Today's post is about the many things that a person may experience during a work day.

1. Start new job. Immediately discover how many muscles go into bending or squatting. Feel like a weakling and a cripple as your back complains and your legs ache. Realize that your P.E. teachers were trying to prepare you for the future, and you were foolish to scoff and think it was pointless.
2. Try to open the supply closet, only to find that the lock is extremely finicky. Spend five minutes arguing with it with no luck, only for a male coworker to open it in two seconds. Accuse the lock of being sexist.
3. Clean public restrooms. Spend the entire time thinking of how much various bodily functions disgust you, and theorize that hell smells like a urinal.
4. Discover that people think toilets are trash cans. Waste time plunging a toilet because it's clogged with eight billion paper towels that someone tried to flush.
5. Wipe down the drink station at least a thousand times a day, because it's eternally sticky. Compare it to a hydra: you cut off its head, and it just sprouts new ones. Over and over and over again, forever.
   
6. Fill containers with ice and transfer them to the kitchen because one of the ice machines is broken. Be told, "Oh, let so-and-so guy carry that," which only makes you more determined to cart around heavy things, just to prove that a skinny 100-pound weakling female can lift anvils. Realize that maybe you're a tad stubborn at times, and this is where your fantasy character got her feminist, I'll-do-it-no-matter-what attitude from.
7. Constantly dunk your hands into buckets of sanitizing solution until your skin is utterly devoid of moisture.
8. Declare that food dye is evil, because it stains things and is a pain in the butt to get it out of surfaces again.
9. Push in chairs using your legs. Wonder why your lower legs are constantly bruised.
10. Have a limited-time item. Weeks after the item is gone, continue telling people that the item is no longer available. Begin to hate the words 'nacho fries'.
11. Decide to take out the trash, only for this action to summon an entire bus full of kids returning from camp.
12. Wonder what sort of evil Christian family would choose to name their kid Nebuchadnezzar so you can spend five years typing it when taking his order.
13. Have a customer place a huge order. Feel sorry for the people in the kitchen who now have to make 72 tacos, in addition to the other five billion orders flooding in.
    
14. Have some people come in regularly, reminding you of how horrible you are with names. Wind up filing people in your head under stuff like 'heterochromia dude', 'androgynous woman', and 'smelly guy'. (I wish the last one wasn't so true.)
15. Try to guess what people want based on confusing or vague descriptions. 'Medium' sauce is mild sauce, apparently.
16. Start wiping down tables, then turn and suddenly realize someone's at the front counter, waiting to order. Begin to wonder if people actually walk through the door, or if they just spawn out of nowhere like in video games.
17. Explain to people that the card reader likes to fake people out by claiming 'transaction cancelled' if a card is put in too soon. Claim that the machine likes to contemplate the universe and the meaning of life, because why else would it occasionally decide to take forever to process things?
18. Constantly deal with wheels that don't want to roll straight. End up naming the mop bucket Liberace.

    

    Lib for short.

19. After a rush of high schoolers on their lunch break, notice things are missing or in complete disarray.
20. Deal with how messy and disrespectful teenagers can be. Frequently think, "I hope one day they have a job where they have to pick up after slobs all day," so they can know what it feels like every day after they trash everything.
21. Find wads of gum everywhere except where they belong. Including the floor, the drink station, and among the sauce packets.
22. Get asked to clean the space beneath the drink station. Kneel on the ground with your upper body deep inside a cabinet, scrubbing ancient soda and tea spills from the time of dinosaurs. Turn a bucket of cleaning solution a dark, murky brown, and render multiple cleaning cloths unspeakably filthy.
23. Mop the floors, then watch as a hundred construction workers track in dirt. Reflect that only a few hours later, it looks like you never mopped at all.
24. Wonder why people always choose to sit in the areas you most need to clean. Is the table filthy? Let's sit there! Are there about three pounds of spilled rice on the floor around this booth? Perfect!
25. Have an extremely slow afternoon where it seems like practically no one comes in. Become so bored you start cleaning random things like windowsills and the decorative molding on the walls.