The Prodigal Returns

This afternoon marked the triumphant return of my co-worker who had broken his arm in August. His timing was flawless, covering all of our fundraising events on top of our usual workload has been taking its toll on the rest of us. I stopped in to see him (and in the interest of full disclosure, to retrieve my backpack, containing my glasses, from my office). He seems to be back to his old curmudgeonly self, though he is still unable to lift anything with his left arm yet. He has joked that he can perform most of the job duties with one hand tied behind his back, so this will be the test of that proposal.

It's nice to be back at full staffing levels, though one of the guys will be leaving at the end of the month. We can deal with bare-bones staffing then, after things calm down. At any rate, I'm feeling a bit run-down, and (for reasons I will elaborate in a future blog post) I may have to put somebody through a wall (nobody I work with, everybody's great) before the month is over.

Oh, to hell with it- I'll tell you why I might have to put somebody through a wall... after our event on Saturday, two guys were in our parking lot well after closing. When invited to leave the property, one guy headed toward the street in expeditious fashion, while the other guy wended his way through a cordon of crowd-control barriers. When I told him to leave immediately, the guy turned around and pointed a laser pointer in my general direction (I always make sure my location is hard to pinpoint when dealing with the public after dark). At that point, I bellowed, "If you do that again, we will construe it it a threat and notify the authorities." I also make it a point to never reveal whether or not I am onsite alone- it's always a good idea to make people think you're backed up by a team of Sherpas, or the NY Giants' offensive line. The jerk and his buddy ran off, but I decided that it would be a good idea to 'sweep' the site to see if they had jumped a fence, not the sort of thing I really wanted to be doing at the tail end of the shift, after I should have punched out.

Overwork and overexposure to d-bags is starting to wear thin. It's good to have the prodigal return to take some of the heat off.