The last two times I have had to leaf blow the cafeteria have been initiated with a ritual that I hope does not continue: the half an hour Herculean untangling of the leaf blower's cord.

I do not exaggerate when I say that it was a half an hour: I'll start at half past and will not finish until one o'clock. Both instances of untangling have been equally frustrating, and I don't expect them to get any better if I have to continue to partake in them. Untangling never gets fun and it never gets easier because each tangle is different. The worst part, however, is that, when you spend a half an hour undoing a tangle, you know that, for the most part, the majority of the tangle was created by you, not the previous person.

A few misplaced folds in the cord could no doubt be attributed to the last person who used it (and in this case, that person isn't me) but the multitude of incorrectly straightened cord and the intricacy of the network of circles that formed these abominations of linearity could not be manufactured by one person's idiocy. My theory, and the theory had plenty of time to develop as the cord revealed new and even newer knots, is that the cord was wrapped one way and, perhaps metaphorically, I unwound it, not from the opposite way, but from the same way in which it was wound. Thus, I approached the problem from the wrong end and ended up exacerbating a problem that could have been easily resolved had I simply taken the other option at the beginning.

This may seem confusing to those not in the shit of it, but, since I had dispensed with the idea that the tangle had been intricately and malevolently composed by the previous user, this somewhat philosophical perspective was the only comfort I had. That is to say, this mess that had been made, and the mess that I probably continued to make, was mostly due to a misunderstanding between two parties: two different standards inarticulately assumed to be compatible at the outset. And now, the panic of possibly never being able to get the damn cord straight, and the knowledge that, seriously I can't just leave it, makes the process more nerve wracking. By the end of it I was exhausted, which may seem ridiculous to someone who has never been involved in a convolusion of idiocy as I have been.

But I did finish, and the cord did become straight and I sort of wonder if the same thing happened the next day when my coworker had to figure out for himself which end to begin on.

Who says education is a good thing?

As many of you may know, I have restarted school. I am now on the track to be a research librarian, or something else vaguely related to librarianism. When I signed up for classes, I realized that my choices conflicted with my current schedule. On Wednesday I had class from 1:30 until 8:10 and on Thursday from 1:30 until 4:10. Unfortunately this meant that I couldn't do the main part of my job, and incidentally, my absolute favorite aspect, cleaning the enormous collection of food and trash up off the floor after lunch. There would really be no way for me to do that with any degree of satisfaction and still get down to campus in time unless I was able to apparate (and believe me, the way parking is down here, I would take advantage of that in a heartbeat). So my solution was to switch days with my coworker: I would take his Mondays and Fridays and he would take my Wednesday and Thursdays. The hours would, of course, all remain the same, but the days would be switched. Personally, I didn't see this ias a problem, but, apparently he did. He did not want to give up his Mondays and Fridays because they provided a certain level of comfort, and, flying in the face of all logic and decency, he refused to give them up.

Despite the vast majority of the staff (including my boss) being on my side, the issue could reach a compromise, unless one considers Me working Tuesdays and after school on Monday a compromise. What that means is that I have reduced my hours from upwards of 18 to eight. As if the idea of paying for a graduate program with 18 hours a week wasn't laughable enough, the thought of doing so with eight surpasses the boundary of laughability and enters the dangerous realm of heart stopping hilarity. Clearly my time as a janitor at that particular institution is somewhat limited, or it should be.

And speaking of shoulds, I should also really be aggressively looking for a job rather than writing a blog, but I'm not. I just wanted to express my abject sadness, to you my readers.