so, a few weeks ago the plea went out: Please, oh please volunteer to work on Saturday, 18 September, at eight in the morning, here at work, during our Nth Annual Orientation Fest — “o-fest” for short — where we will be welcoming the incoming students and their handlers– I mean parents– and telling them all about the services NSIT has to offer, et cetera, et cetera.

your pal niqui, being a well-meaning but stupid sort of person, stuck up her arm and volunteered, specifying that she wanted to work on the music committee. of course there are no guarantees, but that’s really all she is at all interested to do.

weeks go by with no confirmation nor denial of niqui’s desired assignment.

because niqui likes to be prepared (and likes music), she carefully puts together an ofest playlist. this playlist starts out life at 13.5 hours, for an eight-hour day, and gets gradually rearranged and trimmed down to something she was happy with. it includes a lot of stuff for humor value, crosses a number of genres (and eschews many overplayed singles in favor of lesser-known things) while keeping to a mostly upbeat theme for a day outside, and represents a fair amount of planning.

then the assignments come out. niqui is indeed on music, but only in the morning for three hours, and plus she has to work with two other people. one of whom is labelled the “Music Coordinator,” instead of merely “Music” like niqui and the other person.

This Was Not Part Of The Plan.

niqui is selfish, misanthropic, a music snob, and above all, a control freak. and if someone comes up and wants to put some tacky, stupid, trite top-40 single in there, or tries to make me take something out because it’s inappropriate or something, i think i’m going to cry. niqui does not like to share.

as though this is not bad enough, in the afternoon niqui is assigned to work the “Quiz the Wiz” booth, where presumably the short and naive will be asking her inane questions about the intarnet.

listen: if i had wanted to actually talk to people, i would not have volunteered for something that involves sitting behind a couple of enormous and loud speakers where i will be happily unacknowledged. i would rather do just about anything than be put in some sort of spotlight where people are going to be staring at me and expecting me to perform in some way. i do not like being on the spot. it makes me twitch. it will lead to much crankiness, especially considering that that will be my first day with my new toric contact lenses — that correct for the astigmatism i’ve appearently recently developed a bad case of (my doctor’s exact words when comparing my new chart with last year’s chart were “Oh, wow!”) — and so i am pretty much guaranteed to have a miserable headache by the afternoon.

so now, not only am i burning up an entire saturday, i’m burning it up to do things i don’t even want to do.

again: This Was Not Part Of The Plan.

*sulk* *sulk* *sulk*