Second night of three days where I get up at 5:30 am, take the Metro and shuttle to the office job, put in eight hours, take the shuttle back to the Metro and the Metro to the night job and put in a few more before finally heading home for what hopefully will be seven and a half hours of sleep.

Tonight was very busy: short handed, big coupon e-mailed out, and an event — in this case, author Naomi Wolf, coming to promote her new book. Generally, events, to me anyway, are just a nuisance, especially as additional help is rarely assigned, which means it falls on the regular staff to set the area up, introduce the author, assist as may be necessary with the signing, taking the area down, etcetra. Also, I’m never assigned to the downstairs information desk, which would allow me to actually hear the event …

However, in the process of doing recovery (did I mention we were short handed? No recovery got done between 8am and 6pm, which means four of us did an entire day’s worth of work in three hours), I overheard bits and pieces of Wolf’s talk, which piqued my interest enough that I swung through our Politics & Government section (biggest such section of any of this company’s stores, by the way) and scoped out an earlier book of hers: The End of America - Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot, and decided to give it a try.

Since the author was in the store, hell, why not? I asked my coworker G.L. — who blogs here, I’m particularly fond of his “Self Portraits in National Museum’s Restroom” series — to have her sign a copy of the book. She did: check out that heart, too.

Sadly, I didn’t have the chance to meet her. It was a fairly busy night — I’m especially fond of the lady who, after being left on hold for a whole minute, spent five minutes excoriating me for it. But I got my revenge: I was at Main Info, and told her she’d have to hold again while I sent her call to our music department. Har.

So, yesterday morning, my alarm goes off, I hit the snooze, drag myself out of bed when it goes off again, shower, brush my teeth, dress, eat a bowl of raisin bran, throw my bag over my shoulder and walk out of my apartment to find a cute new neighbor waiting for the elevator. So we start talking — all the way to the Metro, where she boards a southbound train and I take one north — and by the time I get to my part time job that evening, I realize her name has slipped completely from my mind. Oh! Embarassing turn of events? What if she’s waiting at the elevator this morning, as well?

Fortunately, I remembered her name when I woke up this morning. Unfortunately, she was not waiting at the elevator. I think I’m the earliest riser in my building — or at least, on my floor.

But this doesn’t scream “Hey, I’m the reform candidate!”

You’ve really got to wonder why McCain chose Palin as her running mate — did he or anyone on his staff sit her or anyone on her staff down and say, “Look, we understand you’ve got this probe, but we’re running as reformers — so you’ve got to cooperate or you ruin our credibility!”

I mean, not there’s any credibility to lose …