Finally, a minute to myself!

Drew was here when I arrived this morning, and he left for the coop sorting job on time, with the report. Apparently, he's got what's been going around, because he tossed his cookies while with the coop folks, and thereupon went home to clean up and go to bed. Shannon went downtown to deliver the report and pick up the mail, which she did and left.

So, it's been one of those "me, ME, ME" days at the store. Between customers, I managed to sort just about all of the first class mail, leaving a lot of catalogs, etc. undone as yet. It was frustrating, though:

label A:
  for i=1 to end-of-tub
    sort-one-piece-of-mail;
    if (length(customer-line) > 1)
      break;
  next i;
  while(length(customer-line) > 0)
    service(customer);
    customer-line--;
  goto(A);

(Can someone explain why I went to the trouble of writing such silly pseudocode? I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it... doesn't communicate what I wanted to say, which was that sorting the mail was very frustratingly slow.)

How I was able to make the mail pick-up deadline at 2 pm (in order to service customers faster, I've been piling mail to the side to be stamped "later") is beyond my understanding. Then I made the 2:45 pm FedEx deadline, somehow. And mirabile dictu, I made the UPS deadline at 4 pm, even though I had to (politely) send some people to Hades on the phone and explain a certain shortness of manner to in-person customers.

Of course, there was no lunch (just as, unfortunately, there was no breakfast), but it's not as if missing a meal or two is going to cause me to starve. Fortunately, Feht stopped by the store this morning and bought me a coffee out of the blue, so I got some calories out of that.

Frankly, I am so tired right now, the thought of food only arouses feelings of chagrin associated with the inevitable work associated with preparation and post-cooking cleanup. I suppose I could go out to eat, but that's not a terribly exciting prospect, either.

Plus, another onslaught of customers has just entered the store.

Cheers...

And now, a word from my _other_ job...

In between all the craziness, Feht managed to throw some work in my direction, a 600-word item from one of his clients, who usually has needs going from English into Russian (Feht's specialty). I just finished it, and the reason it took so long was, of course, my wanting to polish the sucker to a high, glossy spit-shine, considering the fact that (a) this is a new client, and (b) I do not work at bargain-basement rates.

The only problem that I found with the text was a sudden shift from serious analysis to... a sort of "gee-whiz" pair of non sequitur closing sentences. I may have some time tomorrow morning to ask Feht about them, even though I am quite sure they are truly off-the-wall. I want to cover all my bases thoroughly before submitting this job to the client.

In the meantime, I need to put in some serious rack drill.

Cheers...