Fridays with Fran

You've all read Tuesdays with Morrie. Actually, maybe you haven't. I haven't read it, because I have Fridays with Fran (and the occasional other day of the week). Who is Fran? Ah, Fran. Fran is the 82-year-old professor emerita for whom I work. My official title is "clutter clearer." I clear her clutter, and there's a lot of clutter. She's a bit of a hoarder. Not TLC's "Hoarders Gone Wild" level, but she's got a lot of clutter. Here are a couple of fun tidbits about stuff I've done since working for Fran.

• Once, she brought me a casserole dish full of pennies. I thought she was going to have me roll them. That's normal, right? I was all ready to roll, and then she told me that I was to sort them by year. By year.
• She has 500 baseball cards that I had to organize in an Excel spreadsheet. Like the pennies, none of them are worth much.
• Occasionally I have "Fran Homework." This is stuff I do on my own time that involves using a computer. I've searched for private citizens' phone numbers, non-existent chair cushions, organizations that existed in the seventies (but not anymore), and retyped up old documents. Speaking of which...
• There was a poem once that I had to type. It was a poem from Fran's days at sleepaway camp in the forties. "And campers die like flies in the night..." What the heck, Snooks? (P.S. Snooks is not a BumpIt consumer from New Jersey, Snooks was Fran's tween nickname.)
• When almost winter happens, Fran turns the heat up. Today, it was about eighty degrees in her apartment. While I was dying in my normal November clothes, she was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt.
• I sometimes have to organize Fran's financial affairs. I write out her checks, but she has no check registry, so there's no real way to keep track of the dozens of donations she makes to various political campaigns. However, she insists that we keep the receipts from the grape juice she bought at CVS in 2008. Go figure. Sometimes I throw away old receipts when she's not looking (Shh!).
• Fran is an International Business Ethicist. She's going to write a book about Ethics and other things that start with the Letter "E" that are important for business to happen. She has lots of papers that she puts in piles for the research for this book. The pile is over a foot tall. If I were eighty-two and wanting to write a book, I'd get on that. She hasn't.
• She's friends with Eliza Dushku's mom. This is why I need to keep this relationship going. I need to meet Eliza Dushku to get myself into Joss Whedon's posse.
• She's going to buy a new apartment, which is why we're in full warp speed with clearing out the old one. I've seen the floor plan for this apartment. It has a spacious common room so that she can put in a piano...or a ping-pong table. She hasn't decided yet. I'm hoping for piano, otherwise she's going to make me play ping-pong with her.
• Even though Fran is over three times my age, she's got more technological swag that I do. She has an iPhone...or had...she lost it. She has four laptops which she takes to the Geek Squad every other week. She has two mp3 players, and I had to explain to her what an mp3 was. She does still have analog radios and cassette tapes. She was really sad when I had to throw out her Les Miserables soundtrack, so I promised her I'd burn her a CD. She was pretty happy about that.

I probably have more Fran stories that I could write down, and I'll write them if they come up or anything else fantastic happens. As crazy as Fran is, I really like working for her. She's a sweet old bird. I'm not worried about her stumbling across this blog post and finding me out. She may have a lost iPhone and four Motorola phone chargers, but she's not licensed for the blogisphere.