Grandma Meow Moses, head of the black hole complaint department, complains.
Shortly after arriving in this not so much of dream come true old folks home nearly four years ago, I was hired as Millie Noe's writing assistant.
She was in need of help and there is nothing I cannot do, except bathe my private parts as they are too hard to reach.
We spend our mornings together so that I can watch her type and point out punctuation errors, ridiculous sentence structures and lies.
We make a pretty good team.
But as of late I have been doing most of the work and she has been scolding me for it. It is just that as part of my job I must put my foot down on the keyboard when she is in the middle of a bad sentence.
I also stomp on her magnifying key, which Millie still has not been able to locate. For some reason this always makes her cuss.
The reason I enlarge her letters is so that she can see her mistakes. I might be the one with a stinky butt and cataracts, but I think she is the one who is blind. Why can she not see that a long line of qqqqqqqq's is interesting and perhaps just what our story needs.
Or that big empty spaces might be an improvement.
I believe in life work balance.
Staying limber is a must at one hundred. That is why I do not stick to one spot for long. I pace back and forth in front of the screen. I climb down to go out for a bite to eat or to use the restroom or have a drink of water, even though the fountain of youth has been replaced with a casserole dish.
I know!
Of course I return a few minutes later. That is all the time one needs. But this seems to irritate Millie.
"Oh. You are back," she will say in a tone I do not care for.
Why would she wear shorts when she knows I am going to use her thighs to climb up to my proofreading spot? Of course I am going to draw blood. And it is not my fault she sets the keyboard on her lap. She is always moving that thing around. Sometimes she even holds it over my head and types.
Lately I have been in our writing room alone more often than not.
From what I understand the beavers outback are winning some kind of a dam war. I heard her say to her sweet Sven, "The same way beavers cannot stand the sound of running water, I cannot stand the sound of water not running."
One day she had a pitch fork hanging over the side of the driveway and was stabbing into the very elaborate mud and branch work of the Cleaver family dam, when out popped a beaver.
"He was just as surprised as I was," she told me.
"So what happened?"
"He looked at me, dove under the water and swam straight home to tattletale on me to his dad."
The other morning I was like, "Hey Millie, I have been waiting for you for a half an hour. Are you coming to work or what?"
And she was like, "No Grandma. It is too nice to work today."
Youngsters.
It is no surprise to me at all that the world is coming apart at the seams with this new work ethic.
So, yeah.
It is just me in here.
Again.
Work, work, work.
That is all I do.
