Is it the full moon? Something in my pants? What?!
Tonight, for some befuddling reason, was most odd. I worked an evening shift at the pharmacy barely long enough to cover that morning's gas fillup, and someone had apparently left the gate ajar up at the asylum because every damn drooling lunatic in the county decided to show up and ask for a refill seventeen days too soon.
So I exaggerate. I write, therefore I take "creative liberties." Sometimes it's more entertaining than the truth beneath. But anyway.
After being detained for an extra twenty minutes at work by a penny-counting customer at the front register, then running a few small errands, I thought it wise to venture over to Denny's with Chucko.
There, I was accosted by yet another satisfied CVS customer who had stupidly left her keys in the store mere minutes before closing time, then decided to express her discontent with the situation by yelling at me in the middle of my Moons Over My Hammy dinner. In our defense, we'd discovered her keys at about 8:55, and immediately set about finding their owner. Logically concluding that no one could have gone far without them, I even went on a diplomatic mission to Super Fresh next door and had them send a message over the intercom. Closing time came and went, thanks to Auntie Pennybitch up front, and no one showed, so we stashed the mysterious keychain behind the front counter in hopes that the owner had carried a spare set or had begged a ride to the store in the first place.
Cut to Denny's forty-five minutes later, when the mysterious stranger reappears, somehow recognizes me without my white monkey-jacket, and proceeds to foam and froth all over my hash browns. Seeing the chance to prove my customer service skills (skizzills?) beyond the counter, I set about calling the few CVS-related phone numbers I did have, with no success despite the increasingly-obnoxious keyless woman panting down my collar. She managed to get one manager's number from the city cops, but she told her to calm the hell down and wait 'til the place opened in the morning. This only meant I got yelled at more.
I remained placid. The Good Freaking Samaritan, I even offered her a ride home. That wasn't good enough, since, improbably enough, her only set of keys in the world was sitting on the counter behind a locked door and an alarm, and by God, she had papers to deliver in the morning. She demanded to know the name and phone number of the "Goddamn bitch manager" who denied her request; I only gave her my name, rank, and serial number. The last I heard of her, she'd stormed into the parking lot threatening to break in herself, but resorted to begging bored teenagers in the parking lot to hotwire her car for her.
Thoroughly weirded out, I get home and hop on the computer to finish up Tuesday's comic, and I begin getting lots of cryptic error messages and a dialogue box that automatically restarts my computer at the expiration of a one-minute timer. Mark and the comic, it turns out, are at a Thomas Johnson Marching Band staff meeting until 12:45, so I set about downloading scores of Windows XP security updates to shore up my computer's defenses. At approximately 4, I finish, pop open my email, and find that the file Mark sent me with the comic in it is somehow corrupted. No comic. It is about time to start thumping my head rhythmically and steadily against something solid.
So I exaggerate. I write, therefore I take "creative liberties." Sometimes it's more entertaining than the truth beneath. But anyway.
After being detained for an extra twenty minutes at work by a penny-counting customer at the front register, then running a few small errands, I thought it wise to venture over to Denny's with Chucko.
There, I was accosted by yet another satisfied CVS customer who had stupidly left her keys in the store mere minutes before closing time, then decided to express her discontent with the situation by yelling at me in the middle of my Moons Over My Hammy dinner. In our defense, we'd discovered her keys at about 8:55, and immediately set about finding their owner. Logically concluding that no one could have gone far without them, I even went on a diplomatic mission to Super Fresh next door and had them send a message over the intercom. Closing time came and went, thanks to Auntie Pennybitch up front, and no one showed, so we stashed the mysterious keychain behind the front counter in hopes that the owner had carried a spare set or had begged a ride to the store in the first place.
Cut to Denny's forty-five minutes later, when the mysterious stranger reappears, somehow recognizes me without my white monkey-jacket, and proceeds to foam and froth all over my hash browns. Seeing the chance to prove my customer service skills (skizzills?) beyond the counter, I set about calling the few CVS-related phone numbers I did have, with no success despite the increasingly-obnoxious keyless woman panting down my collar. She managed to get one manager's number from the city cops, but she told her to calm the hell down and wait 'til the place opened in the morning. This only meant I got yelled at more.
I remained placid. The Good Freaking Samaritan, I even offered her a ride home. That wasn't good enough, since, improbably enough, her only set of keys in the world was sitting on the counter behind a locked door and an alarm, and by God, she had papers to deliver in the morning. She demanded to know the name and phone number of the "Goddamn bitch manager" who denied her request; I only gave her my name, rank, and serial number. The last I heard of her, she'd stormed into the parking lot threatening to break in herself, but resorted to begging bored teenagers in the parking lot to hotwire her car for her.
Thoroughly weirded out, I get home and hop on the computer to finish up Tuesday's comic, and I begin getting lots of cryptic error messages and a dialogue box that automatically restarts my computer at the expiration of a one-minute timer. Mark and the comic, it turns out, are at a Thomas Johnson Marching Band staff meeting until 12:45, so I set about downloading scores of Windows XP security updates to shore up my computer's defenses. At approximately 4, I finish, pop open my email, and find that the file Mark sent me with the comic in it is somehow corrupted. No comic. It is about time to start thumping my head rhythmically and steadily against something solid.