Collin said that he caught some show on Food Network that was all about polenta.

"Was it awesome?" I asked.

"I didn’t watch it," he said. "I figured I get enough of that at work."

Tonight is his last night sitting next to me because he got a job in a different department. I’m kind of glad that after tonight I won’t have to shield my monitor as defensively, listen to him listening to the best of Lilith Fair, have my every action criticized, and learn of new similarities he shares with Henry. (They both have black hair and glasses and like computer things and Alton Brown, OMG.)

But I guess I’ll miss him.

About as much as Paris Hilton would miss the paparazzi.

I asked him if he’ll be sad when he sits far away and is unable to spy on my every move. Without any hesitation he said "Yes" way more emphatically than I would have guessed.

Though I know he’ll be next to leave, I still have Bob. And without having Collin wedged in between us, we’ll be able to talk about the Real World with greater ease, a topic Collin will surely miss. I’m angry at Bob at the moment though because yesterday he made a big deal about today being some sort of Mister Roger’s Rememberance Day, and everyone was supposed to wear their favorite sweater today. I mean, Bob hyped this so much that it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up. I made a point of selecting my favorite sweater to wear, feeling like it might be akin to spitting on Fred Roger’s grave if I had the audacity to wear a cotton blend instead. Or a polyester lab coat.

Bob is not wearing a sweater today. "Oh, oops. I forgot about that," was his flimsy excuse.

Oh oops. I forgot.

Just wait until the day he needs something. "Oh oops, I forgot about that," I’ll say, when Bob weakly asks if I remembered to bring in that spare kidney he needs to stay alive.

Regardless, it’s still a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Not that I can see much of it.

1. LOST IN THE RAIN: It had been raining intermittedly all day and the sky was pretty, OK — very, overcast. But I still thought it would be Great Idea #465768 to go for a walk. I made it a few blocks before it began raining again; drizzling at first. It was in the fifties today and the rain felt kind of warm and refreshing. So I kept walking.

Another block or two and the rain started to pick up. The drizzles had turned into big fat drops that smacked off me in sort of an unkind manner. "It’ll slow down," I thought, and perservered another few blocks.

Soon, I was about a trillion miles away from home and the rain was coming down in torrents. My sweatshirt was so soaked through that the simple task of walking became more strenuous, like walking with a  toddler on your back. My jeans — drenched. The bottoms of them had been dragged through one puddle too many and made me feel like I was stepping with ankle weights. My hair slapped against my melting face in sopping ringlets. All the people passing me in their cars were probably laughing, but I couldn’t SEE them so what did I care.

At one point, I realized that I couldn’t tell where I was. I was afraid I was going to get ingested into the bowels of Brookline, not being able to see, but I just kept making lefts and eventually some of the blurred blobs I was squinting to make out began to look familiar.

2. A SERIES OF EYESIGHT AND BALANCE MALFUNCTIONS:  Before I left for work, I tripped over the baby gate on my way upstairs. I guess because in my present state of semi-blindness, I mis-gauged the height of it and the toes of my shoe clipped the top. I tried to catch myself, but ended up sprawled across the bottom three steps anyway. Hoping that Henry didn’t see, I quickly looked over to where he was sitting, but we made direct eye contact. He rolled his eyes and didn’t even inquire about my well-being. Right after that, I was walking across the living room and my right foot got caught in the hem of my left pant leg (I was wearing my dumb long people jeans) and I did a very graceful lunge, landed with arms akimbo, and promptly said, "I meant to do that." I don’t think Henry bought it.

When I got in the car to go to work, I hadn’t even pulled away from the curb before nearly crashing, because I had the car in reverse when I floored it and came nauseatingly close to kissing a telephone pole.

3. BROKEN HANDS AND REFLEXES: I didn’t realize how bad I hurt my hand during my daring baby gate hurdle until I got to work and tried to lift the coffee pot, nearly dropping it against my chest as the pain spread up my arm. I mean, I knew it was broken, but not THIS broken. I’m trying to ignore it but every so often it feels like the skin is burning. I don’t know what that means. And then sometimes it feels numb. So I moved my mouse pad over the left side of my keyboard and I’m attempting to convince my left hand that it can handle this new life change, but it doesn’t seem willing to cooperate. I’m not asking it to get a sex change, for Christ’s sake, I just want it to cradle the fucking mouse. I keep highlighting the whole screen by accident and then my left arm jolts and jerks forward like I suddenly have some sort of reflex defect now too.

Everything goes to hell when I can’t see.

EDIT!!! So I deduced that my hand was feeling numb because I had two hair elastics wrapped around my wrist too tightly. That doesn’t, however, change the fact that my hand is broken.

Also, I make no apologies for the myriad of typos I’ve been making in my current state of blindness.

Word on the street is that the company provided all the employees with an array of St. Patrick’s Day cookies this morning. Night crew got gypped, as usual; however, there’s a picked-over tray on the kitchen with a sampling of greasy cheese slices, a clump of congealed jizz (maybe dip?) and three chunks of scary green cake stuff.

Instead, I ate some stale sugar free Girl Scout chocolate chip cookies that have been in my desk for three weeks.

There’s an opening for the evening shift and I’m frightened because whoever they hire will likely be sitting next to me since Collin got a different position here. Whoever it is, I hope they don’t stink of sewage and I hope they stock their desk with a large variety of delicious candies for me to savor at my leisure.

I currently am mostly blind so typing is turning out to be quite an Olympic feat for me. I feel sorry for the recipients of my emails tonight and for the corners I’ve been clipping with my shoulder as I stumble around the building. Lots of groping foreseen for tonight. More on that later.

I used to be obsessed with Bavarian stuff. I’m going to make that happen again.Hopefully whoever they hire will be Bavarian and maybe I can talk them into modeling their lederhosen for me.

Not surprising, the nightly cleaning team here at my job is a real motley crew. I try to avoid the supervisor at all costs — she sits in her office with her fake beehive hairdo, scraping her lethal fake nails along the desk and berating whichever cleaner forgot to refill the paper towels in the upstairs bathroom. (Never does she reprimend any of them for raiding vacant cubicles of candy though. Oh wait, that’s me.)

Her wingman is this rotund piece of sloppy shit with flapping jowls and tinted glasses. He usually rides in with her, otherwise I bet he’d be driving an unmarked kidnapping van. He swears loudly in a voice that makes him sound mildly retarded. Or drunk. He looks like he could be the villain on a cartoon.

I bet he smokes cigars.

I can’t stand him. He makes me feel molested. He makes me feel like he crawled into my window last night and touch my boobies while talking to me in babytalk and is remembering it every time he looks at me.

Last night, I was on my way back inside from a short break. I was forced to pass by him, but felt relieved because a security guard and another cleaning person were with him.

I thought I was safe. I began to slip through the door, when he started shouting in his disgusting voice that hacks up perversion on everything within earshot.

"IT SUCKS REAL GOOD!" he barked. "IT SUCKS REAL GOOD!"

Horrifed, I did what any other person would do, and turned around to see if he was forcing someone’s mouth upon his yuckystick.

We locked eyes.

"The SWEEPER! I was talking about the SWEEPER!" he laughed. At that moment, I vowed to never have sex again.

Bob likes to peruse Yahoo! Answers here at work. He just sent me this one and we’re suffocating under a cloak of WTF.

By the time you read this I`ll be in Trouble Please Help?

Is he afraid she’s coating the couch with venereal disease? And then the rest is just….huh? Please help him I’m worried!

Edit to make public my new favorite:

I’m not really sure my doctor is really a doctor?

I learn a lot from Eleanore’s personal calls. Tonight I learned that ADHD is a disease. And that she knows crime inside-out because she watches "First 48." So, if crime had an asshole, she would know if it’d been bleached or not. Because that’s how well she knows it.

Then she was talking about her friend Sherman. "Do you remember my friend Sherman? Real ugly, dark-skinned?"

I hope my friends describe me as ugly, too. Probably not dark-skinned though.

The other night, she got all riled up because Bob used ‘ghetto’ as an adjective. "What does ghetto mean to you, Bob? I’d really like to know." She just kept asking him over and over and I was becoming fearful. In my head, I was shouting, "No, Bob! Don’t answer her!" He didn’t and life went on, thankfully.

Earlier tonight she was telling us, "There’s only three things I got to do: be black, pay taxes, and die." It was pretty fucking awesome.

Earlier in the night, Bob asked me what a scene kid was so I told him. Then he started looking at pictures of scene boys and was thoroughly disgusted. He’d be quiet for a few minutes, but then suddenly he’d think of another reason to hate them.

"They look so stupid. Why would anyone try so hard to look like that?" I briefly mentioned scene queens, and how there’s a pack of them that are kind of like the Paris Hiltons of sceneland. I found a website dedicated to them, featuring profiles and a gallery, and he was quiet for a little bit so I knew he was taking it all in.

Every once in awhile he’d say one of their names out loud and then look over at me. I felt like he was waiting for me to say, "Yeah, I know her. We carpooled to a Fall Out Boy show back in oh-four."

Two hours later,  I get an email saying, "I think I like scene chicks. It’s the dudes that look beat as hell."

I told him to go to a Cobra Starship show and he’s bound to meet a clique of them. "The thing with scene girls is that they probably only like scene boys, though, huh?" he asked. He looked genuinely sad, too.

I’m going to buy him a white belt and some skinny girl jeans. Maybe a nice fitted hoodie with neon skulls on it. Fix him up proper-like so he can grab himself up a scene girl. (Though I think he’ll be sorely disappointed when he realizes there’s a difference between ‘scene girl’ and ‘scene queen.’ Oh well, we’ll laugh later.)

I did a really Big Girl thing today — I made my own dinner to take to work. It was a delightful entree consisting of two slices of fifty billion grain bread (jetted here directly from France; the cellophane bag promises that it’s straight from a hearty hearth and I believe it), one hearty slab of savory mozzarella, and a couple shreds (the slice kept ripping when I tried to peel it out of the deli bag) of the most ambrosial American cheese your tongue ever did molest. Picture all of this off-set by the tangiest helping of dijon-flavored soy-mayo ever to sink into those tiny pockets in bread.

It was then plated with lots of love and care in fine tupperware with a bright yellow banana to add some flair to the presentation.

When I finished, I took off my toppling chef’s hat and stood back to admire my work. I bet Bobby Flay does that too.

But halfway here I realized I left it on the dining room table. I keep texting and email Henry, begging him to bring it out to me, but he won’t reply. I was nice at first, but then I started in all caps (I WANT MY SANDWICH!) and now I’m threatening to hold the damn Girl Scout cookies I bought from one of the dayshit employees (FOR HENRY) hostage.

Collin, more Pro-Henry than ever, doesn’t seem to think Henry should risk his life driving my lost sandwich to me. Why, because it’s snowing a little?  "It’s just a sandwich," he chided. But it’s MY sandwich. I nearly gave myself callouses in its preparation. I might die if I don’t get to savor the amazing craftmanship that went into building that true artisan sandwich. I’m so upset that I’m chewing on my hair.

Why do I feel like Chooch is probably eating it right now?

I just found out the company where I used to work for four hellacious years has a website. Isn’t the picture of the owners, standing proudly beside a haunting portrait of their dead parents, so inviting? I know it sure makes me want to go in and buy a pound of bacon.

I see words like "dedicated," honesty" and "integrity" tossed around in their manifesto and now I’m laughing. They forgot to mention that they employ rapists and rub out the dates on expired cases of poultry so they can still sell it.

Unfortunately, my amusement is negated by Eleanore and her constant rotation of Mary J. Blige CDs. She’s been on this kick for at least a month now and she listens to it so loudly so we can hear, with absolute clarity, every lyric sung. Like right now, Mary J. is telling me I’m her everything. I used to like Mary J. but now I kind of wish she’d go to hell and take Eleanore with her.

I guess it started around 6 o’clock. Everything was quiet and serene up until then. But ever since 6 o’clock it’s been all beeeeep. beeeeeep. beeeeeep.

At first I thought it was the microwave in the breakroom, maybe someone had abandoned their Hot Pocket or Lean Cuisine and the microwave was crying for them to come and rescue the freshly nuked meal. Kind of like a “Seriously, your fucking food has done been baked for ten minutes now so come remove it, asshole” reminder beep.

We get a five second reprieve in between beeps. Sometimes, during the fleeting silences, I delude myself into thinking, hoping that this is it, that was the last beep. “Listen you guys! The beeping’s done!” I fantasize saying to my co-workers, and we’d all jump up from our seats and embrace in a frantic circle of relief.

No. No, there it is, nevermind. The next beep is always there, creeping up around the corner, nipping at the heels of the previous beep.

Sometimes, I forget about the beep. I force myself to sink down within my thoughts and I eventually tune it out. But then there’s always another noise to bring me out of it — Eleanore slamming a desk drawer or Eleanore yelling into the phone or Eleanore turning up her rap music — and the very next beep makes my shoulder twitch all the way up to my ear. And then for a split second, I have a shoulder earring, and that’s pretty weird.

We sat here silently and motionless, continuing to work, but with muscles still from the tension the incessant beeping had caused, until Eleanore finally decided to seek out its origin.

A digital voice recorder was sitting atop a shelf around the corner from our area, and an alarming red exclamation mark flashed in sync with the high-pitched beeping. Whatever this thing was, it didn’t belong to our specific department and all of the daylight people were gone for the day.

Help was futile.

Three hours later, I knew we had hit dire straits when I was clear on the other side of the building and could still hear it chiming within my skull, because by that point the noise had been seared into my ear canal. It’s like psychological war fare.

I stormed back to my desk and sat down. I sat for fifteen seconds before rising. It was time to take a stance. I marched over to the machine and inspected it. Bob joined me and together we followed the power cord to the socket, but it was taped to it. I picked the heavy equipment up and prayed for a power switch, but there was none. Finally, I yanked a plug from the back. The only thing missing from the scene was an angry mob chanting “Attica!” while taking power cords hostage.

The red light stopped flashing but remained a very serious shade of red, and the beeping morphed into one consistent tone of emergency, like it was shrieking, “You are SO fired.”

I nearly gulped, but then it shut off, stopped beeping altogether. We were enveloped in silence.

Kim called out from her cube, “Who did it??” and Bob proudly announced that I had saved the day. I was pleased, and had a fleeting realization that if Collin hadn’t gone home sick, he’d probably have tried to take credit for it.

We returned to our seats and went back to work, basking in the silence. “I can’t believe it took three hours for us to finally do something about that,” Bob laughed. “I kind of miss it now,” he added.

And then it started again. I was going to unplug it and keep the plug out, but Kim wussed out at the last second and said, “We really shouldn’t mess with it since we don’t know what it is.”

Bob and I distracted each other by exchanging our favorite moments from various seasons of The Real World, but then we were starting to embarrass ourselves with how much we remembered (and cared) so I got up to make some tea while he undoubtedly tried hard to act like that exchange never took place.

I feel like this is some sort of subliminal training session, like I’m going to leave here tonight and begin gutting albino priests without giving it a second thought. Tomorrow morning you’ll find me on rooftops, sniping at homeless people and any other stereotype my company secretly wishes to eradicate.

I really want to fuck up that machine’s day with a rifle. SEE? I’m halfway to an assassin without even trying.

Sometimes Bob will laugh about it. He’ll just let out this crazy ass laugh, it’s not a happy laugh, but  more of an unstable, We’re all mad here chuckle — he’s just laughing because a psychological break is right around the corner and we all fucking know it. And on top of all that, we’ve been instructed to keep track of every single record we look at during the shift, so really when you put things in perspective a constant electronic siren is pretty much the perfect soundtrack to an evening of scratching tick marks in a notebook.

Lalalalala.

When I think of Hell, I always imagine a large atrium-type  room  (but with like, less of the pretty botanical touches and more of the speared shit and car exhaust) where everyone goes to do their chores while enjoying a cocktail of some mighty fine ass rape by staggering penises coated with AIDS, followed by an enema of stagnant leech-filled pond water and battery acid. But after all that daily socializing, everyone relocates to their bunkers — their own little personal Hells-with-the-lid-on.

I think that my room would probably have a row of bottled Henry-snores, the caps of which will lift up in random intervals, broadcasting a nasal symphony around the walls. Eleanore will be seated two feet from me, no matter where I am she’ll be two feet from me, ripping up sheets of paper, slamming desk drawers, and sighing heavily.

Then she’ll stuff her mouth with food and start ranting about racism, while hurling a pair of scissors down against the desk top.

The clatter of that will reverberate inside my head, making my teeth chatter.

The Gum Popper will have a permanent perch upon my shoulders, cracking and slurping and snapping her fat Bazooka Joe-wrapped tongue in my ear and down my neck and even when she pauses, it’s still all I can hear, the ghosts of the gum echoing inside my skull and no matter how many times I gouge flaming twigs into my ear drums, the drums Satanically repair themselves and the new carnations come packing amazing clarity.

A parade of strangers will back me up against the wall with their overused sayings, like “Any-who,” “om nom nom,” “Asshat,” and “Exsqueeze me” and every third one will touch my eyeball.

  And one by one all of my favorite bands will announce their tour dates but I’ll have to miss every single show because if I stop data processing for even three seconds, I’ll be eviscerated by a tag team of Fran Drescher and Jessica Simpson, who will laugh and sing in my face while strangling me with my intestines.

Then Henry’s ex-wife will come strutting around in a tie-dyed shirt, wearing her vagina on her face.

I guess it could be worse. No, that sucks.

Only four of us were brave (stupid) enough to fight our way past the hundred-foot snow drifts and barrell across the sprawling and frozen tundras, just for the opportunity to sit in our swivel chairs and stare at the computer screen for eight hours tonight. We have no supervision, so look out.

I heard Collin tell Bob he brought some date rape lollipops to dole out to the cleaning women here tonight.

Bob is listening to Spoon. As he was putting the CD on, he asked me if I had heard of them. I have, in fact, but saying yes is never enough because I’m kind of musically psycho so I quickly added, "They’re from Texas" to further prove that I know who they are. Just in case my initial "yes" wasn’t enough to have Bob sold. Why do I do that? Sometimes I hate myself.

I often mistype Bob’s name as ‘Bon." Eventually, I’m just going to start leaving it like that.

I plan on staying until 8 before getting all Drama Club about the weather and then working from home. Henry told me to let him know ahead of time so he can get his girlfriend dressed and out of the house. That card.

Tomorrow I’m going to pursue a new career in bread baking. Data processing is for the birds.

What is angry and makes loud, explosive sounds that the military should implement as sonic weaponage, using nothing but paper and scissors, all while listening to Mary J. Blige?

No, it’s not Collin making strings of paper dolls to drape along his bed post to ensure a night full of rainbow-sparkly dreams (he doesn’t like Mary J. Blige-ish music).

Answer: Eleanore clipping coupons. All night long with the clipping and violent release of scissors onto the desk, pausing here and there to yell into the phone about young people being "STOOPit".

Tomorrow night is game night at my house. Bob was talking about how he might bring one of his friends, but that he promised they wouldn’t get out of control. I said something stupid about how that’s OK because I don’t like control.

One of the dayshift guys was still here. He turned in his seat and asked, "Erin, you were one of those kids who had a red A with a circle painted on their locker, weren’t you?"

I laughed and Collin, always forgetting his place, muttered something about a scarlet letter. There was a moment of silence, and then the dayshift man said awkwardly, "Well, I was thinking more along the lines of the anarchy sign…."

It’s nice to know my co-workers think so highly of me. At least now I’ll have a use for the leftover marinara sauce festering in my garbage can. If you need me, I’ll be the girl with pigtails and a moist and tasty finger-painted ‘A’ on her forehead.

Messy food. I hate it. I could never even fully embrace sloppy joes when I was growing up, and isn’t that like, the dream meal of youth? Any meal that requires a napkin the size of a tarp spells out tedium to me. Maybe if it were cubed into bite-sized morsels and someone wearing a tophat and tails spoonfed it to me, I’d have applauded happily like the children in the Mamwich commercials. Then we could call them lazy joes.

I hate the sensation of cookie dough between my fingers.

“Now’s the fun part, kids! Get your hands in there! Make a mess!” No thanks, please pass the latex gloves. I think maybe this is why I never got into pottery.

Tonight at work, we ordered out.

I put a lot of thought into it, as I generally do with everything in life, before settling on a half of an eggplant parmesan hoagie. In past experiences, these hoagies have not been kind to me. You have your rebellious slivers of egglant, slipping off the sandwich and landing in your lap with a greasy plop. You have your strings of melted cheese, pliant and elastic, snapping in half and busting you in the cheek like a broken rubber band. You have globs of marinara that wants desperately to be your new lipstick. You have pieces of bread, paste-like once it mingles with the saliva, becoming caps for your front teeth.

This time, I was prepared. My desk was equipped with a stockpile of napkins; I halved the hoagie; I took slow, small, and careful bites. With luck, I can finish my second half without appearing as though I just ate out a streetwalker with a can of tomato paste plugging her vagina.