Since this is a blog about my place of wonderful employment, I suppose I should open with a little introductory paragraph. I work at The Edge Ice Center which is the new replacement for the old ice arena. I work mostly on weekdays and holidays and twice during the week when I teach snotty-nosed children how to figure skate. I get paid minimum wage to deal with stressful and dramatic situations. Except for when I teach figure skating lessons when I earn $9.25. It's wonderful.

Nobody believes me when I talk about how stressful and over dramatized my work is. Not to be derogatory, but ghetto children like to "chill" at the ice arena. They like to sneak in, steal food, push people down on the ice, cause a ruckus, and get in fights. This of course enrages me when I get in trouble for not catching them sneak in, fall for their "but you shortchanged me!" act, or do not blow my whistle at them while I am patrolling the ice. I shall provide a brief example of a normal situation at the rink.

Last weekend I was rink guarding at a Friday night session which runs from seven to ten. I try to be a cool rink guard. I really do. I am not constantly yelling at people or blowing my whistle. Actually, I leave my whistle in my car. I'm extremely passive until someone ticks me off. So, this child, actually he was like fourteen, decides to start throwing milk crates at small kids. I have like two four-year-olds laying on the ice crying because the kid has whacked them, purposefully, with milk crates. I'm not lying. So I tell him to quit and that he has to take a five minute timeout. The kid goes bizerk. He runs away from me yelling and cussing. I chase the stupid kid for at least five minutes until he's pushing people out of his way, at which point I grab his shoulder. He turns around and slaps me across the face. Extremely out of character for me, I let a few words slip that should not have and I drag his arrogant butt off the ice with him cussing and hitting me. Finally after I have managed to get him off the ice he rips off his hockey skates and throws them at me. I love children.

Back to today. I worked from eight this morning until two this afternoon. It was not fun. There was a group of one hundred and fifty Girl Scouts and their parents that came at nine and left at ten thirty. At two minutes to eleven (the beginning of our public skating session) there was still a massive pile of skates to put away from the Girl Scouts. I spent the rest of the day on the admissions cash register which is normally a pretty easy station to work. Except everyone and their brother decided to go ice skating today, which really made things hard on me. I had a high school JROTC group of fifty five, three church groups of over thirty people apiece, four birthday parties of about fifteen kids each, plus all the random public that decided to show up. I'm sure I screwed up somewhere along the way and the deposit will come up $30 short or over and then I will be accused of shortchanging or stealing. Hoorah.