my collating style is unstoppable

Some people save lives. They cure cancer, or I think about the people that keep planes from crashing. (OK, it's been a long time since my last Mallrats viewing. This is supposed to reference Doherty's breakup speech to Jason Lee. Sorry.) Some of my greatest talents? I can identify any Brady Bunch episodes within the first 15 seconds, just about. I can find you a story, in some format or another, you'll enjoy. I also make one hell of an amateur stylist/personal shopper. I have no problem bravado-ing my way through just about any social situation and/or home improvement project. And I kick ass at repetitive menial tasks.
Seriously. Ever notice how quickly I type remarkably similar numbers into a computer, over and over again?
31912 this is the beginning of every item barcode at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
11912 this is the beginning of every patron barcode at the Carnegie
29205 patrons where I am now
392050 items where I am now
And I suspect, if I really tried, my fingers could still remember the first 5-7 digits of the University of Pittsburgh barcodes, something I haven't needed to know since May 2000...31735. Told you.
Janice and I used to talk about trying to "race" the copiers at our individual student administrative assistant jobs, trying to flip to the next journal page and smash down the bound journal before the light under the glass went away, trying to keep the beat steady. If I get cancer, and it's not lung cancer from the 68D and 67F, not to mention all of the trucks on their way to 376, or second-hand smoky 80s nights, it will be caused by years of making copies with the lid up.
My temp jobs didn't bring out my talent nearly as much as one might think, except when I was working on my trading cards. A coffee house job, on the other hand, is tailor-made for me. I loved the act of grinding, pressing, steaming, etc., especially once I mastered foaming milk. Sometimes I still kind of miss the actual making coffee drinks part of the coffee job. Anyone want to buy me a commercial espresso machine? Setting it up in my kitchen sounds like one hell of a home improvement project for me to bluster through.
With Kinko's, my talent hit paydirt. NOTE: this was nowhere near enough to keep the job from sucking. However, the moments when I was in the back, not having to worry about punkass customers, collating or binding, folding or stapling, were probably when I hated Kinko's the least. One Sunday I stapled hundreds of 1/4 sheet sized booklets using a stand-up saddle-stapler, perfectly content and at quite a pace. This was also, I believe, the hungover Sunday I discovered that my hangover breaking point is not small poorly disciplined children running around a public library, but Simply Red. Really, a career-making point in Jessy's life.
Why bring all this up now, other than because it's a slow-ass Wednesday night and I don't feel like doing a home visit recap or playing Alchemy? Because I think I've finally come to terms with the fact that I'll never be able to plie, or perform open heart surgery, or have a gallery in New York (or screech about having a gallery in New York while pouring beer on my head--jury's still out on my dream of being someone else's Christian Joy, though). But I'm damn good at collating, and I was doing some of that earlier today.
The thing about repetitive mindless tasks is that, while your hands are doing the same thing over and over again, your mind gets to wander. This is perfect for a beer label peeling, fingernail munching, where'd my embroidery go girl like me. And today, as I was putting together summer reading program propaganda, all this is what I was thinking about.