Extra! Extra!

Sleep has become very precious to me lately as various events over the course of the past week have conspired to deprive me of the normal healthy dosage of sweet oblivion. Some will say I spend a more than adequate quantity of my waking hours in an oblivious enough state to compensate for this, but we'll leave that for another discussion.

For the past few days, the greatest obstacle to my beauty rest has been the fact that I have finally caved under the pressure (largely from Daisy) and actually taken up reading Harry Potter. It's taken me a while to get to these because 1)I'm not particularly big on fantasy/sci-fi and 2)I have a natural aversion to popular trends. It turns out that, as in most things, my instincts have steered me very very wrong. Just in case anyone needs to be told, the Harry Potter series (at least the bits I've read) turn out to be every bit the excellent children's/YA coming-of-age books they're advertised as. The characters here are growing up and coming to terms with a bewildering, imperfect, yet beautiful world. They seem to grow the most by learning not to blindly trust arbitrary convention or authority. There are few better things for a child to take away from a book than the value of thinking for one's self. Plus, I can't put the damn book down.... hence the lack of sleep.

I must have been particularly determined to make up for lost time this morning as I managed to remain largely undisturbed by the 5 AM rantings of a drunken Consuela who barged into my room to rant about whatever the hell had happened to her last night.. who knows... the point is I was wholly unable to pay attention. Unfortunately, things were a bit different at 7:30 when I was violently whipped into consciousness by a ringing telephone.

Quick background: Having spent nearly ten years of my young life working in various capacities as a customer service type person, I have grown hyper sensitve to the emotional needs of service employees whenever I come into contact with them. I try not to make eye contact, much less annoying small talk with drugstore clerks. I don't order anything that looks like it might be a pain in the ass for the bartender/barrista to make. I always tip well. (In fact I tend to overtip when I have received what on the surface appears to be bad service because I figure I am at least in part to blame for causing the provider of said service the stress of having to deal with me.) Above all, I have never ever EVER IN MY LIFE asked to speak with a manager.

In light of the above, it was with a great deal of trepidation that I allowed Daisy to complain on my behalf to the Times-Picayune about a weeklong.. um.. interruption in my paper delivery. I was willing to be patient with this because 1)It was possible that someone in the neighborhood was stealing it and 2) I have one of those weird corner apartments to which delivery of mail/pizza/newspapers is naturally something of an adventure. So I can totally understand if not everything gets through on time. The real problem here is that my T-P subscription was a birthday gift to me from Daisy which means that I am not the only one invested in the delivery issue which means that if she wants to call and complain.. well.. she has every right to. And so she did... a few times over a period of days where the T-P phone lackey promised to straighten the situation out but failed to do so... until a week later when the paper began showing up again which it has done without further interruption for about two weeks. I considered the matter closed, although Daisy still asks nearly every day to see if she needs to be put back on the case.

Soooo.. as I mentioned above, my all too brief slumber was further truncated by an early phone call which turned out to be..... my paper delivery man calling to berate me for getting him into such a spot of trouble with his superiors over the lax delivery service. The gist of his lecture: He is a "veteran paper man" and he knows what he is doing. During the delivery interruption, he claims to have been on vacation. Whether or not someone else covered his route inadequately or all of his customers went without service for a week was not made clear. What was made clear was that 1) the man's bosses were "coming down on me" and 2) despite the fact that none of this was my business, I could rest assured that my paper would be at my door on time every day from then on, dammit.

I just hope that's all he leaves there for me.