No accounting for taste

Serving finger food would swell library coffers.

Needless to say, I was a little despondent about the melt down, but then, in the midst of my preparations for hari kiri, it came to me. It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix.

Sorry. Hangover.

Spiderman earns shekels for shutterbugging, Turkish Superman pines for bisection, Wonder Woman alternates between nurse, intelligence operative, & sultry vamp (young Randal's Lynda Carter fantasy certainly counts). Even the radioactive, the interstellar, the televised have to eat & pay the Skinemax bill, which is why I don't comprehend the irrational, near-universal hate (I've got piles of anecdotes) for one of season six's -- cheesy third leg MOTW FX aside -- most chortle-inducing episodes, Buffy's own Office Space or Spinal Tap, forty minutes that's only increased its yay! rating in light of recent Towering Slab fuckery.

Let's recap: Giles' big check is only going to go so far eliminating rancid health care debt, & if the Watchers' Council paid anything like the library -- anyway, so what's a college dropout to do? Collect ass slaps (the tips) waiting tables or sling burgers with OCD management types that find clarity in the dumb. Gee, sounds just like the library, except we serve scowls books:

MANNY: Watch these two.
BUFFY: Are they gonna do something?
MANNY: They're solid. Follow their example and you won't go wrong. They're lifers.
BUFFY: Lifers?
MANNY: In it for life. Like me. You wanna get something out of this, Buffy? You'll do the same. You put the work in, and ten years from now, you'll be where I am.
BUFFY: Wow. They're all so -- identical.
MANNY: Yeah. They all start to look the same to me too.
BUFFY: Oh, no, not the employees, the, the chicken slices. 

'tis verily a truth that because the Peonage are not OCD management types, all the employees do not look the same, provided we discount OCD management types who do. Plus, unlike the Duchess & the Earl, they wouldn't look swell in a catsuit & a bowler, respectively. [ed. note: are we still The Avengers, or a de-gender hegemonizing* Harold & Kumar, minus the wheelbarrows full of weed?]

*curse ye, Iron Lady

Inside joke numéro un (deux, en fait), Pilgrim's Progress how do you know what that's about:

MANNY: Drive-through station's over there. High pressure job, you won't need to go in there. Over there's the grills, the fryers, the walk-in freezer. You don't need to go in there either!

Inside joke numéro deux (ménage à trois), comradeship leads to bunga-bunga, dogs & cats living together, mass hysteria, & a drag after all three:

BUFFY: Fill this? I didn't know there was gonna be drug testing on this job.
GARY: You're funny. You better stop that.
BUFFY: Why?
GARY: Productivity. One of Manny's watch-words. 'Levity is the time-thief that picks the pocket of the company.'

Oh, gentle reader, but we do sell a product, we sell the joy of learning just enough to successfully regurgitate what the hermetically-sealed symposia peg wants to hear in order to spackle over cracked self-esteem. Those of you teachers who strut with a righteous swank, & you know who you are, are of course exempt from these poison darts.

Zombificaiton Ritual, or, everything I learned about librarianship I learned via a series of cliche-infested success journals barfed out by plastic, pill-popping MBA hacks:

BUFFY: So, what's the secret ingredient?
PHILIP: It's a meat process.
BUFFY: Well, what does that mean?
PHILIP: It's a process, they do it to the meat.
BUFFY: But, what is it?
PHILIP: It's just the name of the process.
BUFFY: Oh. Yeah. 

One could say that, as a high-powered heroine, Buffy could simply purloin victuals from the local branch of the multinational food processing concern, but in addition to forsaking her sacred duty, such shrinkage would only lead to laying off those who could ill afford it by the bottom line- & ivory backscratcher-obsessed, & as honorable a task as dismantling global capitalism would be, bloodsucking vampires. Wait, I might need to rethink this.

In conclusion, it's only appropriate that [spoiler alert] the cherry-pie chomping wig lady's supervillainy was a paralyzing toxin, a stark reminder of the monotony inherent in a post-industrial workplace, insert additional ivory tower gobbledygook here if you want I don't care because my expectations for a fair deal have been dulled after years spent at this soul-crushing, above-minimum-wage-but-not-that-much-above hellhole.