The past couple of weeks have been exhausting. We’re shorthanded because K is on vacation, and I ended up fulltime at H&C, mainly concentrating on Sunday ads. Computers crashed, software refused to work, Xerox machines jammed, brokers became fractious, indecisive and anal about working in their classifieds, the postage meter broke, and one of the FAX machines developed constipation and had to be unplugged and replaced with a healthier model. I felt like a hamster my youngest brother used to have, that would run and run in its little wheel, stop, get out, look around, and then appear disappointed that it was still in the same place.

Addie the comroom supervisor, has begun making sinister noises about hiring me permanently.

Fortunately, Ellie has proven to be more than competent and was a true help.

She was excited on Thursday about going to her first baseball game at Pac Bell Park. It turned out to be in an executive box, with champagne and free noshes (hardly the normal baseball experience.) She said it was “brilliant.”

Yolanda is no longer at H&S. No more will the dull routine be enlivened by her prickly interactions with the real estate brokers. No longer will I hear the hiss of her air-cleaning her keyboard, the furious rustling of her filing, the rapid fire of her chewing out a boyfriend over the phone. No longer will I glance over my shoulder to see her powdering her nose and applying lipstick at her desk. She was competent and organized but, I think, unhappy working in an office and a cosmetologist at heart. One of the brokers had already declared war on her and was trying to get her dismissed, and I think she quit abruptly to avoid being fired.

So this past week she was replaced by a temp, Ellie, a tall pink, plump Irish girl barely out of her teens, very well-educated and intelligent, her father a sort of diplomat, her mother an artist. Ellie is studying to be an architect nad has a talent for architectural drawing likely to come in handy at H&C. Currently she is living in a downtown hotel which, she says, is inhabited by a small colony of equally young and therefore equally rowdy Irish ex-patriates. Much of her and K’s talk is about hangover cures and the best pubs to visit downtown on a weekend.

The only problem with her so far as a co-worker is that people have trouble understanding her, especially over the phone. Ellie will occasionally emit a musical refrain of syllables that are lovely to hear but completely incomprehensible to anyone used to standard American accents.

I’ve learned that the Irish do, indeed, say “eejit” for “idiot” and, in moments of exasperation, say that someone “is after” doing something. On Friday, as she was on the phone trying to sort out an ordering SNAFU, I heard her say, “Yuir delivery mon was after bringin’ us the wrong order.”