An introvert's guide to Saturday afternoon.

I don't know what it is today, but people in general are just bugging the living shit out of me right now.

Part of it is not being able to shelve books as I'd like on Saturdays. As usual, I have a great big stack (71 different titles today; I counted) of books that I have to shelve somewhere. Not only are there people milling around aimlessly in all of my sections, but Don had been calling me every five minutes all afternoon. This means, roughly, that I was lucky to shelve five books all day.

Add to this the sheer number of people hopelessly unwilling to look for a book themselves (whatever happened to the joy of leisurely browsing? WHAT ELSE are you going to do on a Saturday afternoon??), and Don's amiable way of leading them by their hand (or having me do it), and those five books get cut down to three. By the end of the day I'm a muttering, impatient asshole, with 68 books that are staring at me forlornly from the book cart.

Claustrophobia, social anxiety, introversion, whatever. Saturday afternoons make me jumpy and intolerant of the presence of others. Grrr.