There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Today, I was very much reminded that there is, indeed, no such thing as a free lunch. I mean this figuratively, of course. A more literal saying might be, There is no such thing as a free day off from work.

Bobby chose to wait until the sun came up to leave for work, and it was good that he did because my car tires were frozen solid to the parking lot. That was interesting. After a half-hour of trying to break me out, he informed me that I wasn't getting out until the sun came up further and the ice possibly softened to where he could chip it away. He broke two ice scrapers just trying to clear my windshield.

The "snow" isn't even really snow: I can walk on top of it without leaving a track, and--in slightly ickier terms--it takes several seconds of steaming hot dog pee before a dent is made in the surface. I attempted to drive my toe through the ice and to the snow beneath without luck. I dare say that this is worse than the ice storm in 1994 when my friend Lisa and I went ice skating in her pasture; then, at least, I would occasionally hit a spot where my foot would punch through. Also, I weighed much less at age twelve than I do at age twenty-five.

Bobby drove me to work, where I had next to no work waiting for me, which allowed me to catch up on the eternally neglected security threat group database. Still, I should have known that it was coming. I should have known. I hadn't gotten new warrants in a week. Warren picked them up last Thursday. Friday is his day off. Monday, the office that processes our warrants was evacuated because of a "police incident in the neighborhood," so he wasn't able to pick up warrants. Tuesday and Wednesday were snow days.

So an apologetic Warren came in with twenty-nine brand spankin' new warrants for me today.

There is no such thing as a free day off from work.

Meanwhile, this was also Pester Dawn on the Phone Day. Pity I must have missed the memo on that one.

My favorite is when the warrant officers call up and, when I answer the phone, exclaim, "Oh, you're in the office today!?" or even better, "What are you doing in the office today?" Ummm...it's a Thursday. Last I checked, I generally work on Thursdays.

It kind of annoys me too because I work the most consistently out of anyone in the unit, yet people are always surprised when I'm there. I'm always there. They'll call at noon on a Friday: "You're still there??" Or at four on a Tuesday. "Why are you still there, Dawn?" *headdesk*

This also makes me wonder who they're calling if they think that I'm not there...?

Anyway, because my car was frozen to the parking lot, then Johnny the Boss made arrangements to have Brian pick me up and drive me home from work. Unfortunately, since things weren't going my way today, I got a call around two from a courthouse in PG County; they had one of our sex offenders and needed a prisoner transport.

I tried Lenny; Lenny didn't answer his phone. (Lenny had called me two hours earlier to express surprise that I was in the office.) So that left Brian to do the transport, which meant that I didn't have a ride home from work, since it can sometimes take hours to get in and out of a prison. So I had to change my plans with Bobby to have him pick me up.

Lenny showed up at the office fifteen minutes later. (Though this ended up a good thing because I'd gotten in another sex offender warrant, so he got on that one right away.)

Tomorrow is Friday, thank Eru, and the start of a long weekend besides. I have nine warrants left to run, a detainer to file, and the review list to compile. After that, I'm finishing the annotation on "The Cottage of Lost Play"--which I've only been working on for a month--and writing, and that is it.

Maybe I won't even answer the phone. Since no one thinks I'm in the office anyway.