KILLING ANNA

I want to kill Anna.

Anna is the afternoon kennel person who shares a job, in a way, with me, the morning kennel person. I am a fat, wrinkled old lady (at least, from her perspective I probably am). She is a 21-year-old twinkie (at least, from my perspective).

We are supposed to take the boarding dogs out, clean the cages and runs, clean cat cages, clean in general. She is stuck with two jobs in the afternoon that I don't have to do in the morning, I'll admit: feeding dogs and wiping out the cages that the day's grooming animals were in (they all go home at the end of the day).

I'm sorry, I know I'm a bitch, but she just does a crappy job of EVERYTHING! She will not clean. I come in every morning and clean up stuff from the day before, stuff that I, were I evening kennel person, would have cleaned up the night before. The runs are still littered with the grooming hair that gets blown around every day. The urine-soaked newspapers under the racks are not changed. There's stuff sitting around where it doesn't belong. The floors are not swept.

I've tried reporting it to the vets. I've tried complaining. It doesn't help; they don't work in the kennel area, they hardly ever even go back there, and they see this as my inability to get along with Anna. If I didn't clean for a couple of weeks and the place began to stink to high heaven, they might get the message, but I can't stand to do that. So I keep doing my job, plus half of Anna's job.

I spend hours of my life, every morning, angry at this girl. It's not a healthy way to live.

Today, after everything was cleaned up and I was grooming a cat, I tried to relax, calm down, get reasonable. The poor girl is just a kid from Podunk, here in Hillbilly County, Missouri, married to same. She'll never go to college. Most likely, neither she nor her husband will ever have a better job than this one. (I have the same job she does, of course, but at least my husband has a real job, and my older kids are in college and will hopefully avoid my sorry fate.) I am the adult here. I need to just get over it, be nice, act my age. I need to quit complaining, to not be mean.

Okay. I can do that. I swear (as I stand there grooming the cat), never again will I make a snide comment about Anna.

Then Anna comes in and says to the other groomer, "You want to hear a joke? My dad told me this and I didn't think it was all that funny, but I told it to my husband and he thought it was really funny."

Keep in mind here, I have black children.

Anna's joke starts out, "What does a colored guy name his dog?"

I didn't hear the rest of it, but that was enough. Sigh. I'm just going to have to kill her.