Are you friggin' kidding me?

So now that the Polar Express is over, I've been trying to make myself useful around the office, mostly to justify the fact that they pay me. The phone doesn't ring, and people mostly don't come in to the gift shop, so I've been cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, and cleaning. And did I mention cleaning? I did that too.

I finally made the back area of the office where I face most of the time look like a space that people work in as opposed to a space people are afraid to step in because of random papers/carcinogens. That took about a day. I plowed through it, plus I had done some initial clean-up work back there when I first started, so that made it easier. I found a bunch more confidential information to shred, that sort of thing. The shredding took multiple days.

For my next project, I decided to tackle the storage closet, which would definitely be a smelly homeless man if it was a person. It is scary, and full of things I don't understand and that we don't need in any way, and full of dirt and muck and oh my god I think I'm passing out from all the dust in this room dirty blech BLECH. The things that were shoved in the front of the closet are things we need occasionally and which have come out during the season. The things just behind those are mostly from when we did Thomas the Tank Engine Takes a Trip into the Utica Marsh (no I'm not making that up) which was in...2003. That's right folks, I've been on a veritable archaeological dig in there. Robert would be so proud. I've found out that the people who used to use the closet used a lot of signage for Thomas parking, adopted a segment of highway once, loved disposable table cloths, and enjoyed killing people! I MEAN - what?

So I haul all this crap out of the closet, thinking that I should probably at least see what is all in there before I decide what to keep and what to throw out, and I started organizing things into piles:

1. Things useful for Polar Express
2. Things I'm pretty sure we don't need but that I need approval to throw out
3. Industrial-type things I don't understand but that I want to throw out because they're ugly but what if they're useful oh whatever I'll put them in a pile
4. Metal signage that's heavy and I don't want to carry very far
5. Definite trash

Among these things are a giant box of Charter Bank coffee mugs, so now whenever anyone comes in to the gift shop, I tell them "It's free to come in, but you're not allowed to leave without a mug and a box of candy canes!" (Al Heywood made that up) It's like Christmas just keeps coming! And so yes, if you want a mug or some candy canes, you should definitely come visit me at work.

Needless to say the trashola pile is the biggest friggin' pile of the bunch. Now we get to the tension in the story: I have never known which dumpster was hours. I never take things out there, but the last time I tried I was told I used the wrong one. So I call the guy who knows where the dumpsters are, and he says "Oh I'm pretty sure I told them to come take it away." Yep, that's right folks, we don't keep our dumpster during the off season because it's the off season and who really needs a dumpster then? The answer is, I FRIGGIN' DO.

So now I have trash all over the office and tomorrow I have to make happy eyes at Russ the custodian who is old enough to be my father but has a crush on me so that he'll take out the garbage to the county's dumpster even though he's not supposed to. Otherwise there's literally no where to move under all this crap. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

...does anyone have any napalm? That would probably help.