"You know what I hate?"

So, I get along with most of my co-workers, which is really good. It helps that the library tends to attract the type of people I am most compatible with, and even those I'm not totally compatible with are still mostly good people. Some of them I might even call friends.

One of my co-workers is something of a recreational bitcher, like me. We complain to pass the time but it doesn't really get us riled up or piss us off for longer than it takes to say it. To others, we probably sound excessively negative, but I totally get it.

But this co-worker and I were in the check-in room one day, and we were talking, and someone dropped a whole bunch of CDs through the book drop slot. This annoys me for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the media return slot is about three steps to the left and most people are just too fucking lazy to take those three steps. Another reason it annoys me is that if we don't get them out of the bin quickly, those cases end up getting broken, the discs end up getting broken, by the much-heavier books dropping on top of them.

So I bitched about that while fishing the CDs out of the bin and my co-worker said, "You know what I hate?" So we went through our list of things that really annoy us that patrons do, and each time we moved to another one, we started with, "You know what I hate?"

And a pattern began. Now it's sort of a joke between us, so every time we're working the same shift and something happens to annoy one or both of us, we say, "You know what I hate?" It usually makes us both smile despite the temporary annoyances. I see a couple of our other co-workers looking confused, but it makes us smile.

I really enjoy my workplace and the people there.