The privileged life of the pipsqueak son of a small-town cop

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the ending of every Encyclopedia Brown mystery ever written.

"If you weren't there, Bugs, how did you know it was a blue bicycle?"
Caught red-handed, Bugs Meany returned Jimmy's bicycle.

Yup, that's about it. As rafaela pointed out, in the real world, it would go more like: "Caught red-handed, Bugs Meany beat the living crap out of Encyclopedia Brown, then shook him down for his lunch money."

Then there's the matter of fees: fifty cents a day, plus expenses. To the best of my knowledge, there never were any expenses, so I can only imagine him dipping into cheap hookers and Percocet in the back of his garage.

Workin' in a coal mine, goin' down, down, down...

Well, it's official: my job has succeeded in turning my brain into half-set vanilla pudding. The last few days have been spent trying very hard not to jump on top of the desk, bare my chest and shriek, "Let my people GO!" Yesterday, Jimmy threw a paper wad at me, and I responded by throwing 17 of them back at him, unwarned, all at once. I experimented a bit with standing at my work station with the keyboard held flat against my chest; I was toying with the idea of attaching a guitar strap to it, so I could type like the synth player in a tacky 80's new wave band. I stop the world and melt with yoooouuu....

Ehh. We all deal with the stress in our own little ways. Flock of Seagulls impressions are less likely to earn me a psych screening than Colleen's favorite tactics, which border on the sociopathic. At the supervisors' desk, they keep Xeroxed coloring book pages for visiting kids to play with, usually keeping them seasonably appropriate. Colleen is fond of taking these pages and, um, editing them with scissors, then taping them to the windows. Her grandest gesture yet was last month, when kids could choose either a leprechaun or the Easter Bunny; she created the image of the Easter Bunny, eating a leprechaun. Yeah, that.

Work has just been plain peculiar lately. Today I dialed an answering machine on which a woman, completely sincerely, said, "I'm so disappointed that I missed your call; please leave me a nifty message and make my day." I had to put everything on hold so I could write that down. (I didn't comply, because I have no idea what constitues a "nifty" message.) Even the crank calls from bored, unattended kids are getting weirder: "Operator, since there's a 911, is there also a 912?"

In other news, they still haven't installed an office wet bar.