Sometimes I reach pretty far for titles, yes.

The administrative staff population here at the Argonut Café is on strike. The four young (so, you know, not me) women who took on most of the work from laid-off employees have found their spines and, as of this morning, are no longer performing maid services. Those members of the staff who find themselves unable to reach the extra six inches required to put their dirty dishes in the dishwasher instead of dropping them in the sink will now find themselves facing an ever-growing mound of food-encrusted glass and tableware.

As Tyro said (and I agree), the staff all have plenty to do with their actual jobs and anyone too enfeebled to put their glass in the top rack of the dishwasher should probably be considering full-time disability. Also? "Female" is not synonymous with "mother."

Tyro (heretofore mentioned as one of the few National 'Nuts who actually liked Jason, on a personal level) is adding an additional level of strike-ness to her personal list. She's no longer cleaning Jason's office (I didn't know she did). Not because of busyness (although she has lots of that) but because he was so rude and unprofessional to her the last time they had an extended conversation that she's no longer speaking to him except on purely professional topics.

He didn't have that many people here who actually liked him, as near as I can tell. I don't think he could afford to lose one. (OTOH, I'm not even sure he's noticed he lost one.)

Another Argonut Afield is leaving the fold. As far as I know, this one isn't taking our toys and building his own sandbox. He's just leaving. Granted, as Tyro and I also discussed yesterday, what we're losing are the weak locations who thought "franchise" meant "no-stress success," it's still painful to lose another location.

In other Armageddon news, the daily storms continue apace. Mornings and early afternoons are lovely. Then banks of black storm clouds roll in, the wind starts whistling, and deafening rain batters the city. It's actually kind of nice. (1) The nightly news is no longer full of whining about low water reserves, and (2) it cools the air down, allowing me to sleep.

The other day, we had so much rain, so hard and so fast, great armloads of rocks were floated out from under the hedges and trees to accumulate in the streets. (I'm guessing, maybe, 3-4 wheelbarrow loads outside our building.) In the storm drains, the high-water debris line averages about four feet above stream banks. People in "garden-level" apartments or unlucky enough to have ground-level doorways are getting flooded.