It's at a really great place, and the upshot is that I feel really comfortable there. Everyone's super cool, the beer is fantastic and the food is better than passable, and I'm already super comfortable and doing well. So things are really pretty great.
The trick about today was getting there. Not in the lots-of-traffic sense (it's all surface streets, 25mph, and six lights/two stop signs) or in the sense of running late (because I woke up at 7:30, made coffee, and that was that, for a shift at 10:45). No, it was actually one of those days where something extremely interesting happens that's completely out of the ordinary, and the day has to get adjusted around it.
It starts because I parked one parking lot south of the one I planned to. My depth perception sucks at times and I thought it was the right one. The parking people were dealing with the meter at the time, so I had to stop basically in traffic while they got the maintenance done. No big deal. I paid, parked, got out of my car, and tried to cross the street, but cars were just stopped in the middle of the intersection. Um....? Oh! Baby ducks in the road! And we are talking TINY. They were tiny enough that two or three could fit in my hand. The curbs dwarfed them. They were brand new--not wet, but maybe, maybe a couple of days old.
The family of Mama Mallard and eight (or so) teensy babies crossed the road without incident. They walked along the gutter until Mama found a likely shrubbery to hide her family in. At this point, I was only a few feet away.
See? TINY. The curb dwarfed them. And several of them appeared to have zero chance of climbing up. So, being the altruistic, kind soul that I am, I bent down to pick up the stragglers and lift them to safety in the bushes.*
All hell broke loose.
The mama duck attacked me. Full out. Squawking, flapping, screaming defensive mama IN MY FACE. And it really would have just been funny, without much aftereffect, if Mama Duck hadn't been projectile shitting at the same time.
Splatter. Splat. Funk. Holy. Fucking. God.
I still had a half block to walk to get to work.
By the time I got there, the shit had started to dry on my jeans. And stink past high heaven. This was worse than pig shit, worse than walking through a cow paddock, worse than a dirty horse stall, worse than driving past a landfill or a natural gas burnoff. This was horrid. It was on my hands and my jeans and I cannot make this up. I walked into work on my first day, ten minutes early (after having been told that if I was one minute late or forgot my training folder, I was fired, period), did my best to scrub off the increasingly-stinky duck shit on my legs, then looked at the manager, and told him to please note that I was ten minutes early, but I had to, had to go home and change unless he really wanted me to wait table smelling like a cesspool.
Half an hour later, my jeans were in the wash, and I started my day shaken, but still madly laughing. A duck? A duck. What is something that floats in water like a witch? Never more accurate.
*Yes, I know that picking up baby ducks, or any baby animal is a bad idea. And I did not actually touch even one of them befor Mama Mallard went crazy. They were so tiny and pathetic that I could not help my first instinct of help-the-babies. Who's got a biological clock?
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