Compadres. Partners in crime. People I stalk.

Things which I don't get to say nearly enough: "Can you break a hundred?"

To make things as simple as possible, I got paid in cash earlier today, and to make things really simple, it was a mix of twenties and hundreds to use as few bills as possible. I'll freely and happily admit it cut down on the volume of currency being exchanged. It also struck me that while $100 is a standard unit of currency, it's an atypical one, which isn't a combination of traits I see much.

My plan was to break them into twenties if the bank was open for customers, or deposit them intact in an ATM kiosk if it wasn't. On the walk to the bank, I decided to buy a luxury imported British film magazine at Barnes & Noble, and in thinking about how to pay for it, I asked the clerk my question.

Then I said it was fine, and handed over $21 to more easily make change for the $15.50 price tag. A much more ordinary type of payment. I took the hundreds to the bank and deposited them at the ATM, as I'd planned.

And for a moment there, just a brief moment, I had a glorious glimpse into another life where I always asked that question.

Thinking it'd look more professional, I went with a messenger bag instead of a backpack today. As professional as it may have looked, I'm going to go back to the backpack. So much easier for so many things on so many levels, not the least of which is being able to ride a bike. Yes, I know bike messengers do it all the time. No, I'm not a professional bike messenger, and I'm unwilling to try. Especially if I'm already wearing a nice dress.

There wasn't much time to read at work, mostly because I'd been given an actual task to do: sorting through patient folders and setting aside old records to discard. Not as much fun as it'd have been if I'd had an MP3 player with me, and still satisfying to see the piles start to rise, and space in the drawers start to emerge. Where there's space in a drawer, there's objects to be discovered, and found my second office perk. A stain remover stick's not much, but it's still something I could take home with me. The first thing is a large can of cold brew coffee sitting in my fridge, waiting for a morning I need a jolt beyond all meaning.

It was such a slow first day, midway through the afternoon, I was being paid to sit there and read. It won't be like that every day - not even other days this week - and even if it doesn't get repeated, I can savor having had it for a little while.

So far, it's a front desk job like all front desk jobs: phone calls, emails, appointments, office supplies. People called, I called them back. Documents were scanned into the computer and copies were made. The clients were largely punctual and there's no music playing. While I doubt I can get away with headphones or a radio, there's a fan I may use for white noise to make the periods of sitting around, waiting for more nothing to happen, a little easier to get through without having to fall back on monetary compensation. Even if I got through a large chunk of some reading today.

Though I suppose longhand writing notes are always an option. If I remember to bring the right notebooks tomorrow.

Ending the month with good news: I've got a new gig. It's full-time and starts on a week where I'll have Friday off, so it'll be an easy adjustment and a decent way to test out if I'm cut for it long-term. Or even medium-term, into the next couple of weeks until the usual receptionist gets back.

I'll be doing scheduling, some emails, some phone calls. Front desk work on the Upper East Side. It'll be easy to get there, and it'll be done indoors and sitting down. I don't think it's going to be all that relaxing and I'm going to have to go back to doing workouts at night in my apartment instead of at the gym for the duration. But it's just for a little while, to see if it's a good fit.

Every time I think, "I need a peer group," I need to remind myself about the various corners of fandom. Escapade is very much made up of my peer group in a not insignificant number of ways, and spending a good chunk of the weekend in such a group's company was a balm. Soothing, comforting. We're of different ages and backgrounds, and we're peers with one another in a way I don't much get in other places.

I even got some practical suggestions for the ongoing job hunt. It always remains to be seen how helpful they are, and the point stands that they're practical, with specific tasks and methods. Another thing to remember: look to one's peers for help. Not for everything, but for many things.

I received what I'm going to take as a fine compliment today: someone I'd met all of four hours earlier said I sounded like I wrote professionally for magazines and other publications, simply from how I talked.

I've decided it's up there with multiple people - completely independently, several years apart, none of them knowing each other - telling me I speak in real life the way I talk online.

Yesterday was largely a smoothly running operation. Once things got set up, it was easy to tell people to feed the ballot into the scanner until the machine caught it and to wait a moment for the confirmation screen, and being told to wait a moment as part of the general instructions helped people do so. There was a moment someone didn't wait, didn't see he'd marked his ballot badly enough it couldn't be read, and he was thankfully barely out the door for us to get him and tell him to fill out another one.

There was another moment someone used a red privacy sheet instead of a black one, which had us worried for a moment before we found out the only major difference in the sheets is the color and any ballot inside them's good to be accepted. A few affidavit ballots got spat out, and so did some with extra marks. Sometimes a ballot needed to be fed in from the other end to get accepted by the machine, and it never mattered which side faced up.

Setting up the machine was easy, except for the part where someone needed to come and troubleshoot one of them, leaving us to open about 15 minutes behind schedule. It didn't cause a backlog or an issue, and all in all, we serviced just over 1300 people - about the same as the election last November. There were more babies and animals this time, and about the same number of children, but beyond that, the adults of all ages blurred together after a while so I can't speak to the represented demographics. Just that a little over 1300 ballots were processed by all the machines, with people showing up early and still coming in at 8:59PM.

Closing the machine was trickier because while all the steps were direct and granular, there were still moments I wanted to double check a part of the process with someone, and with everyone working on something, nobody could say "I'll be with you in two minutes, hold tight until then," which didn't help. But we got it done, and while we were out a little later than in November, with the sunlight having lasted longer and the day itself being much less stressful, it evened out.

One amusing moment came when someone tried to juggle a paper takeout bag, an iced coffee in a plastic cup, and a ballot, and I told him to put the coffee down onto the floor. Which he did. Something in how I told him to do so had one of the other poll workers laughing throughout the day.

Another amusing moment came in the last fifteen minutes of the day. Someone wanted them to work faster and I said we could glare. They looked away and said sure, and when they looked back, they jumped and cried out - because when they'd looked away, I'd pulled out a hard stare to demonstrate the kind of glaring I was talking about. I broke into laughter and they did, too, but man, what a moment to have.

One other poll worker was reading the Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson, which had us talking about systems of power, whether power corrupts or reveals, good research methods, and hypothetical Caro-level biographies we'd like to read. One person said Sacajawea and the LBJ reader said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. I told him I'd want to read one on Tom Cruise, which, given it's a theoretical Caro-level biography, would talk about things like the history of cults and the rise and fall of various aspects of the American film industry to give full context the way Caro's LBJ books talks about the daily life of pre-electricity rural Texas and his Robert Moses book talks about the geology of Long Island to help the readers understand where those men were really coming from.

We also speculated on whether someone would get a 51% plurality and secure a spot directly from the ballot box. We chatted about market tonics and sourdough starters and the terroir of wheat. On occasion, one of the voters was upset about the concept of ranked choice voting, and sometimes they voted for one candidate instead of ranking anything and at least one person cast a blank ballot as a political statement. After twelve hours, I stopped saying people could take pens and stickers and simply told them to take pens and stickers. I ate lunch and dinner in a nearby park and otherwise spent most of the unpleasantly hot day in an air-conditioned building.

Overall, while parts of it could've gone better, I had a good enough time I think I'll probably be back in another few months.