Meat Management

Recently at the library, the already thin veneer of civilization seems to be tearing away to reveal a wild, Lord-of-the-Flies-ish anarchism where any authority figures could easily find their torsos roasting on spits and a primitive religion based on the cargo-cult worship of Dora the Explorer paperbacks could overthrow our entire library hierarchy. Such has been the case the last several nights. A series of strange events that on their own would just seem mildly troubling is instead adding up to create an air of true, slightly threatening weirdness.

First, just a couple of weeks after our Computer Specialist had his pickup truck smashed into in front of the library, his beloved motorcycle was tipped over, keyed and otherwise vandalized. A series of false 911 calls from our lobby pay phone over the past few weeks has resulted in its being removed by the phone company (presumably for our own good?). On a rainy, windy evening when the sun went down just after 5:00 p.m. and the din inside the library was already reaching missile-testing-range levels, an outburst of loud, mysterious banging on our front windows occurred with no visible fury-fisted culprits anywhere nearby.

Taken by themselves, none of these events are noteworthy at the venue some of my fellow employees like to refer to in Serling-esque tones as "The Zone." The natives of this place just seem especially restless these days. The stinky homeless guy seems a little edgier; our mild-mannered, elderly security guard is engaging in shouting matches with only slightly less elderly women; the after-school mobs of pre-teens have a "Paris-on-the-verge-of-the-French-Revolution" tone to their anarchic gatherings. You'd swear someone had laced their Halloween candy with crystal meth after handing out "Come Visit Your Library!" bookmarks.

In perhaps the most troubling development of all, I have somehow been nominated by an electorate of my peers to serve as the Chairperson of the Annual Inter-Office Holiday Luncheon Committee.

I am interpreting this appointment as a mandate to overturn the corruption and embezzlement involved in the previous administration's handling of the signature social event of our library's year. In a scandal of almost Halliburton-ish proportions, last year's leftover meat supply, a mountain of enough barbecued goodness for the staff to pick over until well after New Year's, was somehow made to disappear faster than our library's monthly display copy of the GQ en Espanol quasi-porn magazine.

There are several theories regarding the Great Meat Disappearence. Some blamed the hungry poltergeists who also apparently tear books off the shelves of the children's section and rearrange the letters on the alphabetized spines of DVDs to spell words like "POOP" and "FART." Suspicion was also cast upon last year's apparently morally incorruptible Chairperson, who could well have fed her family for months on the smuggled leftover bounty of our employee feast. The ultimate conclusion of most of the amateur investigators in the building settled on the ample gut of a previous security guard as the ironic culprit. This ill-tempered, id-driven, underbite-having meat wrangler must have stuffed his jacket pockets with pounds of our smoky, delicious bounty and somehow gotten away clean, bearing only the telltale sauce-sticky fingers of a clumsy but ravenous buffet snatcher.

This year, I see my primary mission as Chairperson mostly involving making provisions for an extra layer of security when it comes to our precious meat products. I'll simply have to delegate the decorating and entertainment and other less-vital tasks to my able subordinates while I in turn figure out how to most appropriately fit the term "Meat Manager" into my next resume.