This is not the usual rant about office supply, since I don't work in an office. Until August 10th, I still work at the Centre du Bingo de Hull.

But we use some supplies in the back room, where we get our cards, leave our coats, and make fun of the customers behind the one-way glass.

For one, we use rubber bands. They go around the packs of Bonanza cards. And they breed. See, on a normal day I get three packs in my basket, when I come in at 5:30. I'll take the rubber band off the first pack as I prepare my bundle, and leave it in the back. The other two packs stay whole.

There's three of us doing this job, so three rubber bands, right? The caller sells bonanza, but he does so at the counter, and stash his rubber bands in the drawer underneath. The ones around my two other packs either go in the trash as I unwrap them, or back in my appron - And, only at the end of the shift, back to the backroom basket.

Except the rubber bands all end up in the change-rolling-plastic-things basket, in the backroom. There's alway fifty or so of them - To get that many rubber bands, we'd have to sell for over a thousand dollars of Bonan's, at 0.50$ a piece. And I could understand at the end of the shift, or at the beginning, if the last day's bands hadn't been cleaned up. But at any moment in the shift, there will be rubber bands. Many of them.

I shoot the bands. I fire them at coworkers as they go by, I fire them through the cash-passing slot into the vault (Supervisor : 100 pts. Computer : 50 pts. Every article of stuff you send on the ground : 25 pts), and I fire them at the surveillance camera, for the heck of it.

(We call that camera the "Blackmail Camera", because all it ever catches is staff attics. Like me dancing, or my boss and one of the supervisors pretending to... Yea.)

I can actually fire rubber bands with my bundle of cards in my hands. Unsupecting colleagues, beware!

(I never shot a band at a customer. I have /accidentally/ hit them in the ribs with my microphone, but...)

Yet no matter how many bands we'll send all over the floor, THERE ARE MORE IN THE BASKET!

I have a theory. The pens turn into rubber bands. (We expend about 10 pens per shift, mostly because it's a dark room, and the pens are black.)

Someday, I'll get into why the change rolling thingies get dirty. Or why we only have 1$ rolls when you need quarters rolls, or 2$ rolls when you need looney rolls.

Or why there's a walking cane in the lost and found. I mean, did the guy hobble out of the hall? Or was he one of the customers we shipped out by ambulance? (One every three months, average. We have a customer die about every weeks or so, says a colleague who reads the obituaries. Luckily, it never happened in the actual hall.)

But the best lost and found item was the pair of inflatable fake breasts I found last Saturday. They were a big hit at the staff party that night.

Eti"Look! I'm Mickey Mouse!"enne