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“I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace Archives

June 4, 2008

Free Work’s for Suckers

For nearly two years now, I’ve been “working” for a semi-legitimate film-criticism website that has, so far, earned me a broken computer that I can’t fix (which was supposed to be a bribe that I could either use myself or sell on eBay — hard to do either when I can’t make it work). In my defense, I don’t do that much work for it, and when I do it’s pretty much self-satisfying. In the beginning, the guy who runs it would send me the shit cluttering his desk, which nobody else wanted, and I’d happily review it. I haven’t done that in a year; he still sends me the clutter, but I don’t review it.

The advantage I have is that the man remembers absolutely nothing. Case in point: if you’re wondering how I hooked up with this guy in the first place, he was one of my professors in college. I wrote a paper in that class that he apparently felt was so good, he scrawled in the top margin of the first place, “Please make a copy of this for me to keep in my files.” This filled my already hyper-inflated ego to capacity, only to burst when I came into class a week later with a fresh copy for him, only to be greeted with befuddlement and mild amusement. He had no idea why I was presenting him with a blank copy of a paper he’d already graded (at first, he assumed I was turning it in late) and refused to take it.

I’m astounded by how little he retains, but most of the time I find his bewilderment in the face of things he should already know advantageous. The first thing he had me do — and really, the only thing I still do regularly — was update one guy’s weekly column using GoLive and templates that have existed since about 1999 (that’s not exaggeration for comic effect). I realized how inefficient and inept this system is, and how it’s caused these pages to become bloated and useless (dig into the source code and find metatags promoting Ghost World that has no business being there, not to mention 750,000 div tags because GoLive adds them for every paragraph you generate but doesn’t delete them when you delete those paragraphs).

I’m not what you’d call good at web design, but I’m a pretty devout hand-coder, much more willing to fuck around with trial and error until I get things right than leaving it in the hands of a WYSIWYG program that does nothing but bloat. So one of the first things I did was pitch the idea of switching over to some blogging software as kind of a rudimentary CMS. I know it’s hard to tell by looking at this place, but I’ve developed an alarming knowledge of MovableType’s templating architecture and, when I find something can’t be done, inevitably there’s a plugin that’ll make things work. I knew that with their templating engine and my HTML knowledge, I could replicate the entire site, as-is, without any fundamental differences in its look and feel.

Boss Man disagreed. He saw the word “blog” and instantly dismissed it, saying he didn’t want his “professional” website to look like a blog. We exchanged a few argumentative e-mails before I gave up, knowing by that time that if I waited a few months, then took a different approach, he’d be more receptive.

So when he presented the idea of buying the Adobe Creative Suite, which costs a ridiculous amount of money (even with his educational discount), I told him no, he shouldn’t do that. Avoiding the word blog entirely, I noted that there are free “content management systems” available online that can do what he wants to do better than Dreamweaver, and since all he’d use the other programs for is image resizing, and he already has an older copy of Photoshop that can do that, he’s wasting his money.

He liked the CMS idea, but I guess he was asking rhetorically because he’d already bought the Adobe software. Suffering from pangs of buyer’s remorse, he sheepishly asked if Dreamweaver could be used with one of these free systems. I said, “Of course,” without knowing whether or not it’s even true.

Springing into action, I took the time to dummy up a few new pages and a new graphical theme, all using MovableType, to show him what it can do. I sent him the URLs to the demo pages, explained to him what this architecture can do — almost entirely self-reliant, he’d never have to waste all that time hand-updating pages full of archive links, he’d never have to fuck around with fonts; all he had to do was copy and paste from MS Word. I knew this would appeal to his underlying laziness.

He loved both the redesign and the sales pitch, so I started to go ahead with it, expanding the layout to encompass the full site, then importing articles. A couple of weeks later, he took me by surprise when he e-mailed me and asked to send him the raw HTML pages of my redesign so he could use them.

I wrote him back, “Uh, yeah, it doesn’t exactly work like that,” and re-explained the way the new system worked, what would have to be done to launch it, and then once it is, with a new system founded on MovableType and CSS (yeah, the old site is so old and creaky, it’s all tables and font tags despite the endless div tags), we’d never have to worry about cross-site inconsistency again. You’d go back to articles from 1999, and they’d look the same as the ones from today. I’m certain I’m alone on this, but I often get a creepy, haunted-house vibe when I wander a large, old, ineptly coded website that has all these old, out-of-date pages with mismatched design, broken images and links.

I knew I wasn’t getting paid, but by this time it was more about me and my friend Mark, who I’d cajoled into writing for the site. He expressed some frustration that he wrote what he felt were pretty good articles but were embarrassed to put them down on a resume because he didn’t want people clicking on the site and seeing how ugly, sloppy, and unprofessional it looked. It occurred to me that, without consciously thinking about it, I felt the same way. That was the motive for the redesign — the writing from certain other reviewers was bad enough; at the very least, a fresh coat of paint would create the illusion of a high-class site. Besides, shortly before really digging into the redesign, I was told by Google that I needed “more projects experience” before they’d consider me; since I have exactly 0 “projects” to my credit, I figured this would be something big, elaborate, and impressive to work on.

And that’s what it’s become. I know I’m not a coding god — shit, 80% of the time I’m flying by the seat of my pants, and Googling solutions from other people to rig it up — but what I’ve done with the website so far is impressive. Every section has its own stylistic quirks, which in theory doesn’t play nice with MovableType, but it’s easy enough to trick it with plugins. By now, I’ve reached a point where very little is left to do, and I’ve spent the bulk of my time importing articles — nearly 1900 in, with about 1800 left to go. I’ve done this single-handedly for two reasons: adding more people, especially techno-spazzes like Boss Man, would just make things too confusing. Decisions need to be made to get the articles imported as quickly as possible. What’s going to happen if they freeze up every time they encounter something like Boss Man’s misguided decision in 2003 to have “dual reviews,” using columns with one person’s review covering one half of the page and another’s covering the other half. (A decent enough idea in theory, and I’ve seen it in practice on other websites and magazines, but it’s one of those things that only works when the writers have different opinions. When both reviewers of a movie love it or hate it, for roughly the same reasons, it’s not exactly a clash of the titans.

Although I’d told all this to Del and gotten his okay before I did all the work, he still e-mailed me about a week ago with a confusing suggestion: first, he guided me to a website of costly WordPress templates without seeming to realize WordPress is dreaded blogging software; second, he’d once again forgotten something pivotal and useful — I’m already working on it.

So I wrote him back and told him to save his money — everything with the redesign is already in place, with the exception of one or two kinks I’m still working out, so it’s mainly a process of importing articles. I glossed over the total uselessness of Dreamweaver in my redesign but did mention the consolation prize, that templates can be edited via Dreamweaver using an extension (which may not even work — I haven’t even install the copy of CS3 he burned for me). Instead, I focused on singing the praises of MovableType, both in general and as a superior product to WordPress (whether or not that’s true is irrelevant; I stuck with MT because it’s the program I know, and I’m far too lazy to learn another one to do free work).

He seemed pleased with it, especially the part where I said writers would be able to post their own shit (which I think would breed anarchy, but I knew it’d appeal to his laziness). I gave him his login and password to play around in the system a bit, but he…didn’t. Instead, he did nothing for almost two weeks, then e-mailed me this morning to say he’d really rather just pay the $75 for the templates — again, not realizing that these templates have nothing to do with Dreamweaver. They’re for WordPress, so even if we switched over, it’d be the same goddamn mess we’re already in — only we’d be starting from scratch instead of from 1900 entries into it. Oh, and did I mention he wants templates that will make his “professional” site look exactly like every blog on the planet, the very thing I’ve painstakingly avoided?

I don’t even know what to say when confronted with situations like this. It’s like, I think everything’s all worked out, and then suddenly he’ll throw a curveball that makes absolutely no sense. I know the only solution is to keep arguing for MovableType, reexplaining the benefits (and the amount of work already put into it) ad nauseam. He wants a different look? Fine, I can edit the templates that already exist. The system is in place, and as I already told him months ago, once we establish the basic concepts, we can change anything we want. He wants a horizontal menu, not a vertical one? Fine. But don’t tell me I’ve wasted six months of free labor, and don’t tell me it’ll be another year before we launch the redesign because of all the time required to import all those articles, just because he had a whim.

Posted by Stan on June 4, 2008 1:23 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

March 6, 2008

Workplace Comedy

The gossip mill is abuzz with the news that the girl at work who trained me to “student surpasses teacher” level forced my former boss to make good on a lunch he owes her. He owes everyone in the office lunch, and this is the first time he’s ever actually done something about it. Why would he do this?

Simple answer: the idiot, who I left her to finish training, cannot learn. The Trainer wanted to go out and have lunch with The Boss to discuss, at length, her problems with The Idiot. But, of course, nothing happened. He’s been backed into a corner, and he’s finally admitting it. Because, remember, if she fires The Idiot, work slows from her aunt, and his lead man — brother-in-law of the aunt — has threatened at least once to make a power play to usurp The Boss’s job. This is bad because, at this point, the lead man does all the work and The Boss takes all the credit.

Turns out: it’s not just up to The Boss. He doesn’t manage the entire branch, and the actual branch manager — as well as the regional manager — are exceedingly unhappy. The Trainer has tried to keep up with it as best she can, but she’s juggling more responsibilities than she deserves, so the warranty work has slowed down. Customers have started complaining, and The Boss can only stave them off with the “the other guy quit and she hasn’t been trained” excuse for so long.

This week, shit has really hit the fan.

On Monday, the branch manager discovered The Idiot’s MySpace tendencies, and was both irritated and revolted when he learned her MySpace login implies her disgusting fatness is supposed to be sexy*. Yeah, they’ve used VNC for as long as I’ve worked there to monitor HTTP traffic, which is why I’d sit around on Hotline (or sit around writing in a WordPad file I’d e-mail to myself at the end of the day) but never did anything too obscene or abusive when I was on the web. I’d never be dumb enough, for instance, to constantly login to MySpace, a site notorious for excessive and unnecessary page loading and refreshing.

Normally, Internet abuse is usually handled with a stern talking-to. If it increases, you may get written up. Getting written up is actually fairly difficult because, even without the branch manager’s lasseiz-faire management style, the company doesn’t use a “point” system like many companies I’ve worked for, where they say it’s “three strikes, you’re out” when in actuality, it’s more like 30 strikes. But you can get written up for more minor infractions. At this company, it really is three strikes, you’re out, but you have to do something really severe to get written up…

…unless somebody with the authority has it in for you. So combining the horrible work with the Internet abuse, the branch manager felt okay writing her up. It’s clear from her past work that it’s not a one-time thing. She got written up. Two strikes left.

Lying is another sure way to get written up quicker than usual (again, going back to the theory that you’re pissing off someone in authority — most bosses don’t like being lied to, especially when it’s glaring). As a random example, let’s say you have car trouble. You start work at seven, and you work 20 minutes away, so you warm your car up at around 6:30. Only it doesn’t start. You try for five or 10 minutes to get it started, but it’s pretty clear that’s not happening. So at 6:40-ish, you call in and say, “I’m going to be late.” It’s still 20 minutes or so before you’re scheduled to start, you have a reasonable excuse — no muss, no fuss, unless you do it every day for a month or something.

Here’s what you don’t do: not show up and leave everyone wondering where you are until around 8:30 before calling up to say, “Hey, I had car trouble, but I’m on my way.” This is what The Idiot and her aunt did on Wednesday. It’s common knowledge that the aunt picks up The Idiot every morning, so it was only surprising that neither one showed up in the sense that they should have been there. It was more surprising that both of them called within 30 seconds of each other to announce they’d be late, after already being 90 minutes late. So it’s pretty clear that they were both lying, although nobody knows why.

The thing that cracks me up about this more than anything is that the aunt was formerly an exceptional worker — fast, efficient, and smart (all things considered). Ever since The Idiot started, the aunt’s work has declined rapidly — meaning that, instead of hiring a new employee, The Boss has actually kinda lost one. Or two, if you count me.

Thanks to the obviousness of the lie and the violation of company policy (it is written in the handbook that you have to call at least five minutes early if you’re going to be late, and seriously, five minutes is pretty generous), both the aunt and The Idiot got written up. Maybe it’ll be a wake-up call for the aunt. Hell, maybe getting written up twice in one week will be a wake-up call for The Idiot, too.

Snicker time: because I quit, The Boss has lost what little shot he had (not much of one, to be honest, so it’s kind of a hollow victory) to become the branch manager of a new branch.

I sat back there and, thanks to some creative accounting, made the branch around $10,000 in about four months (that’s excluding the other three months I spent trying to figure out how to creatively account). For the most part, this is chump change, except they went from making the tiniest profit in the company to falling somewhere around the middle of the pack. Now they’re headed back to loser status. That’s the magic of being a college graduate (even one from an art school) working far, far, far below your skill level. I managed to do a lot of things not even The Trainer figured out.

Because I’m gone, the regional manager is starting to think maybe The Boss doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing — he doesn’t know how to hang on to valuable employees, and he’ll replace them with any mangy moron he can find. I have been told that, in the wake of my quitting, they took the warranty situation very seriously as a deciding factor before tossing his name completely out of the hat for the new branch. I know it’s mean, but it makes me very, very happy.

*Unlike certain folks who may read this blog, I am of a mindset that “big” can be beautiful. I was raised in the Midwest, so that kind of mindset is pretty ingrained. However, in this case…maybe it’s because she’s such an idiot, or maybe it’s because she clearly does think she’s sexy, but nothing is more nauseating than attempting to look at her.

Posted by Stan on March 6, 2008 5:53 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

January 9, 2008

Notes from Stupidland…

I wrote up nearly 50 pages of material explaining in detail every single pitiful aspect of my job. What follows are some transcriptions of the sloppy, barely literate notes my trainee took:

“To find WR in da shop, do they stock parts go to your #1 order processor type in your part # & under neath dat you WY C P-Loc = S 32” (instructions on how to find parts in our computer system; it makes as much sense to you as it does to me)

“It gives you the part # & descrption then you go into part # type # gives you vendor” (no idea; I don’t even know what “it” refers to)

“They are on top left bins (in front of me)” (in reference to some paperwork boilerplate)

“In da bak of office (by comp.) right side top of file cabinet you will find some manilla enevelopes w/writting on them inter-department delivery”

I should also note that everything I typed in boldface is highlighted in yellow, indiscriminately.

Do I really think she’s that stupid? Sort of. I think a lot of the incoherence comes from her not really taking notes — just trying to look like she was doing something. It’s anybody’s guess, though. She might think these are really good, sound coherent notes. Maybe the way her mind works, they will help her succeed. I’d just hate to be there on the day somebody moves the “top left bins” in front of her, or moves the “manilla enevelopes.”

The bulk of her notes, though, were mainly directions, names, phone numbers, dates, and times. I decided to be nice and not post them, but I’m not exactly surprised to find she was more interested in keeping track of her social life than in learning how to do the job. I quit now, so I can snicker at the thought of them forcing her to do a job she can’t. I’m not a bad teacher, even though I resented her being there in the first place. “My” new girl, the one before the current girl (of whom I refuse to claim ownership), didn’t do a horrible job, comparatively speaking. At the time, I thought she was an abomination, but now I’ve realized she was obnoxious, not as smart as she thought she was, and frustrating. I didn’t like her undermining what little authority I have, I didn’t like her sitting there with me all day (thus preventing me from fucking off, and also yap-yap-yapping in my ear).

I had many problems with “my” new girl, but during the week I had her doing things on her own, to my surprise…she made a couple of minor mistakes, but she didn’t fuck up nearly as much as I thought she would. It would appear that, when faced with a problem, without having me to rely on, she broke down and consulted my procedure manuals and did things right. The mistakes she made were mostly mixing up numbers, a problem the guides couldn’t help, anyway.

And then, after about a week on her own, she quit. I don’t know if she felt she couldn’t handle the job, if she thought it was too tedious when she was by herself, or if she got a new job. Most people don’t just up and quit a job because it’s boring; I’ve only had two jobs in my life that didn’t bore me out of my skull, and trust me, I’ve had more jobs than anyone on the planet. But I’ve never quit one because I was bored; I usually quit them because of the paranoid fantasy everyone has conspired to get me fired. Of course, usually I’m right. I actually caught a glimpse of her personal e-mail over her shoulder, and it looks like she had a few from Manpower, so I’ll assume she got a new job.

I was happy with her gone, but this new new girl is a nightmare. She takes every bad quality of “my” new girl and intensifies it by about 1000%; even worse, she’s related to not one but two people who work there, hired to perform a job whose storied history includes a guy who wasn’t even fired after literally not doing any work for three straight months (no, I’m not referring to myself). It’s clear they don’t care about the position, and it’s clear that she’ll never get fired, and it’s even clearer that she won’t quit.

So I quit. I knew I’d never get fired, but fuck this jobs. Shitty jobs are shitty jobs, and I needed the money and the insurance, but I don’t need an ulcer (and yes, I got one) for a job that is, at the end of the day, a complete waste of time. And a job I was slowly being fucked out of in the first place; they wouldn’t have fired me, but they were giving me what they felt was a promotion and I felt was a demotion. So that was it. Fuck those motherfuckers.

And now I can snicker as I imagine the new new girl lost in a sea of paperwork she doesn’t understand, opting to check her MySpace page every 30 seconds instead of trying to figure out how to do the job. Oh, also, I took back my procedure manuals. I deleted them from the computer. She has nothing to go on but the month of training I gave her, which would be more than sufficient if she wasn’t an imbecile. I took them partly out of spite, but mainly because I made them to help my boss in the likely event that I quit and he couldn’t replace me right away. But he fucked me, so I don’t owe him anything.

Oh, did I mention I made a scene? It was my most epic resignation ever. I usually just quietly sidle out one day, or give notice without elaboration. But that’s because most of my jobs don’t piss me the fuck off. I had grievances to air, and I wanted to air them in front of my coworkers so my boss couldn’t spin it that I got a new job and was just moving on. I tried to do it in front of the new new girl, but for the two weeks before I quit, I told her there was nothing to do and to go away; she was more than happy to oblige (did I mention we didn’t get along and I made her cry at least twice?), so she went off to help her aunt in the back and never returned to the warranty office. I didn’t complain, but she was off somewhere in the back when I quit, which was unfortunate.

Nonetheless, I explained in blunt, profanity-laden terms that I had been royally fucked and I can’t take it anymore. They stuck me in the warehouse for half-days (which would have been bumped to full days once the retard was fully trained), and — this is another reason I wanted to make my scene in front of at least a few coworkers — I wanted to let them know that I was shocked by how comically easy the job is. I’m in pretty bad shape, so I was kind of looking forward to doing some physical labor (so that as soon as I quit it for a better, cushier job, I’d get all fat again). Except…there is shockingly little physical labor. Everything small goes on a cart that is pushed from one end to the other. Everything large goes on a pallet that’s carried by a forklift. That’s it, unless it’s so tiny or light it can be carried by hand.

Now, I’m sure there are safety reasons for it, and the lazy ass in me doesn’t mind it, but fuck, I’ve worked in coffee shops with more grueling physical labor. And at least in a coffee shop you have to use your brain once in awhile. It’s a shitty job with asshole customers that becomes a mind-numbing routine after a month or two, but it requires more brainpower than looking at a part number and location on a sheet, finding the location, finding the number, putting it on a cart, and pushing the cart across a room. I had mastered the entire job in half an hour.

Did I feel like an asshole for insulting my coworkers’ livelihood? Fuck those motherfuckers. Most of them were glad to inform me that I wasn’t doing “real” work, so I was equally glad to inform them that their definition of “real work” is bullshit. It’s certainly different from the warehouse I worked in during high school. Besides which, most of them are either drunks and semi-legal immigrants (or both!) who either can’t do better or don’t want to do better. They want to drink on the job. They don’t know enough English to do more than read simple numbers. Either way, fuck ‘em.

I told my boss I didn’t appreciate being completely fucked over because I was nice enough to be honest and let him know I had no intention of staying at this job any longer than I had to. I also let my coworkers know about some secret gossip nobody was supposed to know about. Because fuck them. The new new girl is training for my job, but one of the reasons she went off with the aunt is because, at the point when she was fully trained for my job, she was supposed to learn this other job and then, eventually, do both. The aunt would then usurp the job of an old codger, who they would force into retirement. People like the old guy, which is why they didn’t ram it down his throat sooner. He can still do the job, albeit a little more slowly, so what the fuck? Answer: the aunt is my boss’s best friend/second-in-command’s sister. So they create a position that’s not open for her niece, then move the aunt to another closed position, ousting two more qualified employees in the process.

My boss clearly didn’t like hearing that. He tried to cut me off, but I wouldn’t let him. He tried to defend himself, at which point I told him to fuck himself. Then I stormed out, never to be heard from again…

…until ten minutes later, when I realized I hadn’t punched out. I called a coworker and had him do it for me, to spare the embarrassment of coming back. But I had planned that resignation for weeks, literally (I stayed on to get holiday pay). I had slowly made all of my personal effects disappear the preceding week, so I left a free man, and I left nothing behind.

Because fuck those motherfuckers. I may be unemployed (again), but I can laugh.

Posted by Stan on January 9, 2008 3:42 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

October 6, 2007

“My” New Girl

I hate my job because it doesn’t pay me what I’m worth, on plenty of levels it’s degrading, and it has nothing even remotely to do with my theoretical career path. However, I did like a few things about it, mainly that I never had enough to do so I could fill the void by doing more important things like blogging. I didn’t get the chance to do much blogging, though, because right around the time I decided to dust the ol’ blog off and start ranting on a regular basis, my boss announced he had hired my replacement, and she’d be starting Monday. This was three weeks ago.

“What an unusual set of circumstances,” you are undoubtedly thinking. “I couldn’t imagine anybody who writes so much about cinema and masturbation being anything but a model employee. Why would your boss fire you, then torment you by forcing you to train your replacement.” Well, way to put the cart before the horse, buddy. This all stems from a Three’s Company-esque misunderstanding. To wit:

They hired me part-time, initially. When they found I grasped the job pretty quickly, they asked if I’d up things to full-time. My health insurance had just expired, so I jumped at the opportunity — at first. I dropped straight down in mid-air, Wile E. Coyote style, when they told me I’d have to commit to a full year before they’d pay benefits. I’ve had worse jobs, but at the end of the day this is a shit job that I won’t look at as anything other than temporary (even though I’m not exactly moving on to bigger and better things). I wouldn’t commit to anything, deciding if they wouldn’t pay benefits if I didn’t commit, I just wouldn’t go full-time and I’d buy my own insurance. I could have used the money, but fuck them! This is an example of my anti-corporate indignation hurting me.

Eventually, my boss came to me and said, “We really need you full time.” They didn’t. I was running out of things to do working half-days. “So what, do you think you’ll be here until, like, the end of the year maybe?”

“Maybe,” I said, coming closer than ever before to making an actual commitment.

“Well, if you’re full time you’ll get benefits no matter what,” he said, slyly pretending he hadn’t said something totally different the week before.

“Fine,” I said. We arranged my new schedule and I filled out the insurance paperwork.

Somehow, this conversation led him to believe I had conclusively stated I’d be out the door at the end of the year. He also decided it’d take three months to train the next person; this is based on his previous experience training people to do the job. I picked up most of it in about three weeks, and it’s not because I’m some kind of clerical genius. If you’ve had any office experience, you’d have to be a complete idiot if you couldn’t do this job. He seemed to disagree, so he started interviewing people in August, ostensibly to start on October 1st.

Instead, she started halfway through September. I was a bundle of nerves the weekend before she started, for three main reasons:

1. I had just trained somebody from a different branch how to use certain online systems, which is the easiest method to use when it’s available, and it’s the easiest one to start people on when you’re training, but because of him I used up all my paperwork.
2. What if she was really hot? What if I stuck to my usual routine around really hot women and said something stupid, lewd, and/or unknowingly sexist that created some sort of legal catastrophe?
3. What if she wasn’t really hot — what if she was just hot enough? Like, nobody I’d stumble and stammer around, nobody who would physically repel me — the kind of person who, after many weeks in close quarters, isolated from the rest of the building, would end up helping me turn my shitty little office into a full-blown Sex Cauldron.

There is also the matter of my daily job routine: sit around on the Internet for six hours a day, iPod blasting, ignoring every single other person in the building until they occasionally break up my day by making me do actual work. A new person, sitting next to me all day, every day, would drastically shake up this routine. I can’t sit around looking for other jobs, chuckling at inane blogs, chatting about porn on Hotline, or — most detrimentally — use the time to write, be it an inane blog entry, an obscene blog entry, or — most shocking in its rareness — something worthwhile. It’s hard to talk shit when the person you want to talk about is reading over your shoulder. It’s also hard to write hilarious incest stories and pornographic elegies under the same circumstances. The job doesn’t leave me much time for anything constructive except on the weekends, so I liked having the freedom to do what I liked when I liked (within reason).

All that was gone when the new girl started. Most of my fears were allayed pretty soon after she started — she didn’t care much about being bored out of her mind, she wasn’t even close to being hot, and she talked nonstop about the baby she just had and said a lot of really fucking stupid things. The combination of the two work like an anti-boner, ensuring flaccidity and a total lack of sexual ruminations regarding this girl. She had no problems with me using filthy language, as I often do when badgering people for money, had no music preferences whatsoever aside from “no rap” — she didn’t even care about the comically sexist lyrics permeating 90% of the music I enjoy. I thought things were going to work out fine, until I continued to peel back the onion and discovered one important flaw:

She’s really just…she’s so stupid I’d laugh if I weren’t forced to sit next to her all day and try in vain to teach her. Worse than that, she thinks she’s really smart. She doesn’t understand much of the job, and it’s not because I’m such a terrible teacher. I’m not a good teacher, but I did do one useful thing. I compiled a “book” of standard procedures, how to navigate the archaic AS/400 system, how to do everything online, how to do everything by hand — basically, instructions on how to do everything I have ever done with this job, written in terms so detailed and explicit (yet simplistic) that anybody could follow it.

Her problem? She doesn’t use them. I went through things with her verbally, and she relies on her malformed memory of my teachings, rather than the hard copies right in front of her face. Because, like I said, she thinks she’s smarter than she is, so she never thinks she’s wrong. When she says something to me that leads me to believe she’s misunderstood or misinterpreted something I’ve sad, which happens frequently, initially I’d correct her. She doesn’t accept corrections. Instead, she’ll pause, look at me like I’m the idiot, then say, “No, what I’m saying is [rephrased version of her confused interpretation].”

At the peak of frustration, I replied to one of those with, “What I’m saying is, ‘You’re wrong.’” I believe this is the exact moment she and I both knew we wouldn’t be friends. This doesn’t stop her from talking incessantly. In fact, if I thought she had enough cunning and self-awareness to pull of such a feat, I’d swear she talks nonstop about trivial bullshit just to drive me insane. She seems to choose moments when I’m trying to concentrate on anything but her to start talking about her baby or telling hard-to-believe stories. I surreptitiously increase the volume on the speakers to drown her out, but she just talks louder.

Then, on Thursday the 27th, I thought I had finally won. She didn’t show up for work, with no warning or explanation. I relived the glory days of sitting around, relaxing, and had a great time doing it. Then, she showed back up for one of the worst Fridays in American history — and she personally contributed to the badness of my day.

Here’s the thing: on Wednesday, my boss forwarded an e-mail from FedEx saying his online account would be deleted in two weeks because of inactivity. On Friday, I decided to deal with this, thinking it’d be a nice, light problem to tackle. How wrong I was…

I tried their standard password recovery tool. They said they’d e-mail the password to the registered e-mail address. Sure enough, my boss got an e-mail —

— giving the username. The username we already had. The username I had entered and clicked “E-mail password.” Yeah.

So I tried clicking the other link, the “Forgot password?” link, which asked me the security question: “Where were you born?” My boss barely knows how to work a computer, so he insisted he didn’t set up the original account. He tried putting in three different possible places he was born, to no avail. He figured one of my predecessors entered the place they were born, so we were at a loss.

I said, “Fine, I’ll just call them up and have them reset the password.” No big deal, right?

The FedEx CSR took me through the whole thing, asking for the username and e-mail address, and then she asked the security question — the same security question. “Funny story…” I chuckled, telling her what had happened.

Her less-than-enthusiastic reaction? “I’m sorry, we ask that question for security purposes, and if you can’t answer it, I can’t proceed.”

I hung up and said, “Fuck these motherfuckers! We’ll just use Holland.”

The new girl shrugged: fair enough. We moved on to other things, and after awhile she excused herself. This is pretty common; I assumed she was either going for water to use the can. I continued to work, happy for the momentary peace.

I noticed the new girl had been gone for a long time, but I didn’t give a shit. About 20 minutes later, I went up to the front office to make some copies, and there stood the new girl, at the desk of a girl named Debra. Technically we’re equals, but she did my job for seven years before moving on to sales — she knows more about it than anyone else, she trained me, and she’s really funny and cool. I’d hang with her if she wasn’t 10 years older than me and in possession of two kids. I wouldn’t bug her with trivial shit like, say, recovering the password on a FedEx username we could just as easily let lapse and re-register. She’s the kind of person who will take the bull by the horns even if she really doesn’t have to, then complain about having to yell at so-and-so from a particular company, and how much time it takes out of her schedule.

But the new girl hasn’t been there long enough. She doesn’t understand “nuances” like that; she doesn’t understand that — for the moment — I’m basically her boss, in the sense that she’s clueless and everything she does ought to have approval from me until she knows what the fuck she’s doing.

Also, what possessed her? All I can think is she knew she was doing something wrong, or knew I’d be mad about it or tell her not to do it, which is why she said, “I’ll be right back,” rather than, “I’m going to go ask Debra about this.” But what motivated her to even bother, after the finality of “Fuck these motherfuckers”? Did she think this would help? Was she trying to somehow get me in trouble, get me out of the way? Had I misunderestimated this stupid act? Turns out, I hadn’t. More on that later.

All told, Debra spent over an hour on the phone with various FedEx people, all of whom jerked her around. Apparently, FedEx.com recently merged Ground and Freight accounts into one entity, which has created some kind of chaos. The account for our branch, they say, has a bill-to address in Florida, which makes no sense because we receive and pay the bills. At one point, my actual boss noticed the pow-wow around Debra’s desk and asked what we were doing. Debra gave him the gist of it, and he wrinkled his nose and said, “Fuck them. We’ll just use Holland.”

See? I’m no genius, but I know one thing: he doesn’t care how we transport freight, as long as it gets the fuck out. It’s not an issue of rates or courting carriers or going through a broker or anything like that — he just wants the shit to get gone. I feel the same way, and I felt vindication the instant he said that. I announced that I’d said the same thing before the new girl forced Debra to call them, and she didn’t seem to enjoy that. I thought maybe it’d force her to realize that hey, I know how to do this job, and until she’s at my level, she should keep her mouth shut and just shadow me.

I can’t explain her motivations for what happened next any more than I can explain anything else. It’s either stupidity, a desire to usurp my authority, or perhaps a mental decision she made to try to do something right that day. I kinda think “stupidity” covers the other two, though, because (a) what authority? and (b) she doesn’t know what she’s doing, so even if she wanted to do it right, it’ll end badly.

The incident involved more bullshit. Some fun backstory: I came in Friday the 21st to find a FedEx Ground package on my desk with a call tag. At the time, I didn’t know what the fuck a call tag was; I just knew we didn’t do FedEx Ground, meaning it was a collect shipment, so I had no idea what to do with it. The return address was to Debra’s attention, but she wasn’t in on Friday. I figured it could wait until Monday; I figured wrong (see what I meant about not being a genius?). I asked her, and she said, “Didn’t someone come to pick that up?”

“Uh…no.”

“Huh.”

That was that, until the 28th rolled around and I just wanted the fucking thing off my desk. I asked my boss what the fuck to do with it, and he said, “Oh, that’s where that package is!” He grabbed it and ran excitedly to the FedEx driver, who by coincidence happened to be delivering stuff. And there it is: the call tag alerts our delivery driver to pick something up. End of story. I would have guessed that if the call tag had said something like, for instance, CALL TAG on it. It had nothing but a barcode and two addresses. Way to help, FedEx!

The driver said, “Oh yeah, they canceled that call tag. Here’s what you do…” He gave me the phone number for their nearest distribution center, gave me a department to talk to, and told me to tell them I need the call tag reinitiated.

I did exactly what he told me to do…and got VoiceMail.

“Goddammit,” I grumbled. “I’m just going to wait for Debra to get back from lunch and see if they’ll take it back if we send it UPS prepaid. I don’t give a shit about paying for it. It’s going to Minnesota. That’ll be like $4.50.” I also hate knowing things like that off the top of my head, but whatever. “Besides, if it’s collect, that means Mitsubishi needs to re-initiate the call tag, not us, which means Debra is going to have to get in touch with them. We can’t do anything.”

I went to go let my boss know what was going on, and in that time the new girl took it upon herself to go talk to the driver and let him know what happened. He told her how to get to the switchboard operator to be connected with a human instead of VoiceMail. First, the apathetic FedEx person told the new girl they threw out the call tag and couldn’t reinitiate it, and when the new girl tried to accuse her of bullshit, the FedEx person told her it’s a moot point since Mitsubishi would have to do it.

New girl: 0; Me: 2.

But still, I don’t understand the motivation for her random bouts of misguided assertiveness. I think she’s too stupid to want anything other than to be nice and help, which is noble, but it’s less helpful when you take initiative without knowing what you’re doing. I don’t like battling windmills if I can avoid it. Sometimes they look at me funny and I have to, but normally…no.

Speaking of moot points, I decided the whole thing wasn’t worth worrying about when she didn’t show up on Monday. Or Tuesday. On Monday, my boss said, “She’s not coming in today.” On Tuesday, he said, “She said she’d be off Monday and maybe Tuesday, but she never confirmed so I don’t know what’s going on.”

He called her Tuesday afternoon, and she said she’d be back on Wednesday at noon, so, he said, “I guess if she doesn’t show up, she’s not working here anymore.”

So Wednesday morning rolled by. I got back from lunch at noon, and…she wasn’t there. Thank fucking God, I thought, collapsing into my chair, relieved that the long personal nightmare of training this girl had finally ended. I could show the boss the “procedure manual” I had created and tell him, “Look, I don’t need to train anyone anymore!”

And then she showed up at 1:45.

When I acted surprised, she got all indignant and said, “I never told him noon,” which I knew was bullshit. Even if I hadn’t, I would have known as soon as what she told me next:

“I caught pneumonia from my baby.”

Pneumonia?! Even if I believed she could present with symptoms and have it mostly run its course in four and a half days, she simply baffled me when she announced the reason she was so late was because she was at the doctor’s office, after spending four days with pneumonia! in order to get a diagnosis. For pneumonia! And that she only took the days off so she would no longer be contagious with pneumonia!

So, okay, she caught it from the baby, which meant the baby presented with symptoms first, which meant he’d get diagnosis first, which meant she could pretty much infer when she started presenting that she had caught it. Which basically means, if true, the baby showed symptoms and she waited a week or more to take him to the doctor and find out for sure what was wrong with him. She’s already proven to be the most apathetic mother in the history of time, so this is more reasonable than you might think.

I wanted to laugh because it was so fucking moronic, then I wanted to cry because she thought I’d actually believe it. She didn’t even have any kind of congestion or cough; even if she had had the fastest bout with pneumonia ever, at the very least she’d have shown some symptoms before taking time off work, or had some residual symptoms after she stopped “being contagious”? She didn’t even act tired or worn out — no change in demeanor.

Do I care that she lied? No. I care that she thinks anyone would believe it. I’ve made up more plausible lies to weasel my way to the front of a Dunkin’ Donuts line.

Nobody’s going to call her on it because, the fact is, nobody cares, which is extra reason not to lie about it. The only concern anyone ever showed was over whether or not she’d ever come back.

After my two and a half days of blissful solitude, I decided to take a different approach to her endless talking. Whereas before I’d tried to engage her in conversation as I tried to get to know her, in the hopes we’d get along pretty well, I now know enough about her to know I don’t like her. At all. (And it’s not just the lying and…whatever was going on with the FedEx stuff. There’s the maternal apathy, the ignorance-while-insisting-she’s-right, her unsubtle racism, unabashed-yet-uninformed Bush support — I could go on, but do I even need to?) I want her to go away, but I don’t want to be turned into the bad guy and get myself in trouble. Solution: respond to everything she says with a series of noncommittal grunts. No banter, no “I can relate to that retarded story by sharing one of my well-crafted tales of woe and sadness” — nothing but coldness and unenthusiastic acknowledgment of her existence.

I don’t know if this will “stifle” her enough to make her want to quit, but it’s not even just about that. If I could just get her to shut the fuck up, I’d be okay.

Or, even better, if I could get a better job, I’d be better than okay. More on that next week, hopefully.

Posted by Stan on October 6, 2007 5:09 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

October 5, 2006

New Arch-Nemesis

Since I’ve left college, I haven’t once seen my former arch-nemesis Owen at all. I’m not complaining about this, but I do feel a little hole in my life that was once filled with an enemy so vile and distasteful that I actually blogged! There was a douchebag in L.A. (well, a lot of them, but one in particular who approached arch-nemesis territory), a chump at my mysterious accounting job earlier this year, but they never really got the bile a-spewing like Owen did. There’s The Manager, who I do most of my bitch about lately (both on the blog and off), but he doesn’t make me angry. Frustrated? Yes. Confused? Certainly. But he’s one of these guys who’s so confident and yet so thoroughly incompetent that you end up just feeling sorry for him.

And then there’s the new hire at the coffee shop, who I’ll call Owen II (please pronounce this “Owen the Second”). Know why? Because, somehow, some way, they’re cut from the same cloth. I thought Owen was one in a million, and believe me, in many ways he still is. But Owen II shares many qualities with Owen, both physically and spiritually. They’re both big, hairy, dumpy gorillas, they both have that intoxicating musk of onions and corn chips deep-fried in Kentucky Fried Chicken batter, they both have extremely thick glasses that mask squinty, beady eyes, and they both talk in grating, high-pitched voices with mild lisps. (A semi-random aside: I heard this voice very recently, watching the movie Capote. I knew Owen’s voice struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t place it until I was reminded of what Truman Capote sounds like. It seems like typical Owen weirdness to try to intentionally mimic somebody like Truman Capote, but I think in this case it is his real voice. It’s just eerily similar. Owen II’s voice is slightly less grating but what he lacks in shrillness he makes up for in loudness.)

More irritating than the physicalities — which become a moot point if you can look away, stand a safe distance from the odor, and avoid talking to them — are the mental and emotional dispositions. Like his predecessor, Owen II has a superiority complex without having any reason to feel superior. Mainly, he thinks he’s better than the job, his coworkers, and the customers. He’s had “restaurant experience,” which was supposed to mean something but, to be frank, cafés and restaurants are very, very different animals. Owen II has slowly figured this out, which I discovered via one of his other personality “quirks”: he whines about everything. He’s not quite as openly hostile and brazen as Owen — somehow, Owen II has just a teensy bit more social decorum, probably gleaned when he studied humanity for the first time at his restaurant job(s) — but then again, I’ve only known him for two days. Maybe he’ll get more comfortable and turn into a real asshole.

Back to Owen II’s superiority complex: when I first met him on Tuesday, one of the first things he whined about was how it’s been so long since he’s worked. This rang just a tad familiar with me, and I admit that even with the mild whininess I wanted to give him a shot. So far, I’ve liked everyone I’ve worked with here. This leads me to conclude that the manager has decent taste in employees. For about three seconds, I thought we’d establish a rapport over our mutual job-hunting struggles and we’d get along fine.

Then he said, “Yeah, working in a coffee shop is pretty much the bottom rung of the retail ladder, but I was desperate.” Some of you might remember my last entry from six years ago, where I said fuck other people’s opinions about my station in life, because I know I’m only in it for (a) what little money there is, and (b) the actual enjoyment of my job. This last is a pretty rare thing, I think. So I hope it doesn’t seem more hypocritical than usual that this comment from Owen II offended me, because it has less to do with his perception of me — though I’ve gleaned his perception of myself and everyone else who works there is pretty negative, hence the superiority complex — and more with his trashing something I enjoy.

And let’s face facts here: I could think of dozens, maybe even hundreds of retail jobs that suck worse than a coffee shop. It’s pretty easy work, and exceptionally less disgusting and degrading than pretty much any other food-service job I can think of, Mr. Waiter. On top of this: if he’s so much better than the job, why is he working here? Why has he failed to gain employment at a restaurant, what with his extensive experience waiting tables? I mean, shit, I could go to downtown Schaumburg and pick up three jobs waiting tables in 20 minutes. Are you daring me to do it? Because I will, and I’ll scan my check stubs to prove it, motherfuckers!

At least when I was hilariously failing to get jobs, I was applying for shit that was way out of my league, requiring a level of experience, education, and intellect that I couldn’t come close to matching. I wasn’t applying for degrading fucking jobs as a waiter, dancing for quarters and making half of minimum wage. I could pretend to be all superior, like, “I’ve quit better jobs than this,” but you know what? I’ve had jobs that pay better for significantly less work, but — and this will be shocking, I’m sure — I kinda hate being paid to not do anything. Sure, it’s fun for awhile, but after a few months it actually becomes more exhausting not doing work than it is to be on your feet working your ass off all day. I’ve done both, and in a perfect world I’d be making the money of the former to do the latter.

Was that a tangent? Back to Owen II. The dude just doesn’t stop whining and complaining. “This is more cleaning than I’ve ever had to do in my life!” he kept saying, over and over. And over and over and over. And any time anybody told him to do something, he’d get this look on his face like, “Oh God, more work?!” and then he’d roll his eyes and either do it half-assed, pretend to do it, or not do it at all.

Which is why it kind of surprised me when, on Tuesday, the manager said, “I think he’s gonna work out.” You…do? Interesting. But he had completely changed his tune by Wednesday. Every time Owen II was out of earshot, he’d say, “This kid has a real attitude problem, doesn’t he?” I’d agree readily, and he’d say, “It’s not going to take him far.” I couldn’t disagree with that.

The most irritating thing to me was that Owen II seemed to feel there was some kind of sister-solidarity thing going on between us. We’re both working jobs for an admittedly annoying manager for slave-wages — unite! So he’d always come up behind me, blowing his hot nacho-cheese breath into my face as he’d whisper a sarcastic comment. If I didn’t completely disagree with the sentiment, it was probably only because I couldn’t fully hear it. And I didn’t care to have it repeated, because what’s the point? In fact, half the time I’d literally ignore him, just pretending I couldn’t hear him. Somehow, he believed this to be true.

On Wednesday, it kept seeming to me like he had something big he wanted to tell me, but he didn’t quite have the balls to come out and say it. Maybe because I’d rat on him, or maybe because of the way the manager bursts in and out, he didn’t want to get caught talking shit. Finally, just before we closed, when the manager went off to do his admin duties, Owen II came up to me, all confidential-like, and he said, “If you want to know why I’ve been such a big asshole tonight, I’ll tell you…”

The sad and hilarious thing is that I hadn’t noticed anything resembling a change in Owen II’s attitude. He was as big a prick on Tuesday as he was on Wednesday. I muttered and made a noncommittal head gesture, not paying full attention, because you know what? I was busy closing the store!

Owen II took that as his cue to proceed with the story. “You know Marc?” Marc’s another employee. He’s pretty funny, and he’s a video game nerd. We’re tight.

I nodded, and Owen II said, “Well, yesterday after you left, I closed with him, and I said — completely joking the whole time — that I wished I could go home so I could have a cigarette.” He chuckled uncomfortably; I didn’t join in, so his laughter tapered off even more uncomfortably. “Anyway, I don’t even know why, but he went and told the manager, who came up to me, like, five minutes later and said, ‘You better watch what you say.’”

Now, look, I’m new, but I know Marc well enough to know he wouldn’t just idly run off telling something as inane as that to the manager, and the manager — high-strung as he is — wouldn’t respond like that. There had to be something more to the story. I didn’t want to ask the manager because, frankly, I don’t like talking to him. Also, it’d seem like I was ratting, too. I knew I was closing with Marc the next night, so I figured I’d find out the dirt then. There seemed to be a lot of holes in the story, especially with the cigarette thing. One of the mild injustices is that the smokers — of which there are only two — can pretty much take smoke breaks whenever the fuck they want, whereas nonsmokers don’t have the same privilege. Occasionally, if there’s downtime, we’ll take a 10-minute faux-cigarette break. Most of the time, we don’t get any. Whoo-hoo for shoddy labor laws — in Illinois, you’re entitled to a paid 20-minute break if and only if you work a shift of 7.5 hours or more. The manager’s solution? Seven hour shifts!

At any rate, Marc is one of the two smokers. He’d be the first to say, “Dude, if you want a cigarette, just go out and smoke one[, you big baby].” Why didn’t he? Like I said, there had to be more to the story, and the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was.

Meanwhile, as I continued trying to close with no help whatsoever, Owen II decided it’d be a good time to start making and/or returning phone calls. This led to my favorite moment of Wednesday night, reminiscent of Owen I’s hilarious backfired “I am Spartacus” moment. He was trying to act all bad-ass, like “Oh man I have so many calls to return, people just aren’t used to me working again!” He made a call as I mopped the goddamn store.

“Hey, Katie,” he said into the phone. After a moment: “It’s Owen II… Owen II… Owen — I live up the street… Yeah… Yeah… Oh. Bye.” I wanted to start laughing right then, but I try to hold in my meanness while I’m on duty. I unleash it in the form of screaming and making obscene gestures at the few drivers on the road who are worse than I am.

Owen II made a second call: “Jim… It’s Owen II… Owen II — come on, you know who I am.” He looked up sharply at me. When he saw I was staring right at him with a hostile and amused look on his face, the sheer terror in his eyes melted into a veneer of faux-amusement. “I don’t know what it is with people tonight,” he said to me. When he glanced away, putting the phone back to his ear, the panic-stricken look returned. I can only assume this was an attempt to impress me, or to otherwise create the illusion he has an active social life, and it had exploded in his face like an Acme™-brand T.N.T. detonator.

We closed up and went home for the night. The next day, I asked Marc about his feelings on Owen II and, more specifically, about the “I wish I could go home and have a cigarette incident.” First: Marc hates Owen II as much as I do. As do all the employees who have met him. Good to know. Second: Owen II, as I suspected, omitted huge chunks of the story to make himself seem unjustly persecuted. The similarities to Owen I just keep increasing.

Here’s what really happen: trainees have to fill out a workbook, filled with information that then leads to stupid questions and worksheets. They’re dumb, they’re a waste of time, but you know what? I’ve had to do one for every single café job I’ve ever had. It comes with the territory. There’s a lot of shit to memorize. Even I, who pretty much has this whole coffee thing down pat, had to learn a lot of shit about their specific blends of coffee (i.e., roasting level, origin(s), flavor “bouquet,” etc.), as well as learning the specific formula combinations. Every place I’ve worked has been just a tad different, and this is no exception. They want me to steam milk differently, they (in particular) make cappuccinos in a different and stupid way, they have different specialty drinks.

So yeah, the trainee manual is stupid but important, especially for a newbie. A lot of it is “learn by doing,” but some of the stuff — specifically learning about the different coffee blends — is something that just isn’t learned by doing. People come in and order a large dark roast; they don’t want to discuss the Coffee of the Day’s origins or whether or not a cranberry-orange scone will go with its distinctive bouquet.

Trainee manual rant: over. Owen II simply refused to do it. He seemed to feel, despite Marc’s status as shift supervisor and Owen II’s status as trainee, that he didn’t have to listen to a word Marc said. He only had to listen to the manager, and the manager wasn’t there, so when told him had half an hour to work on his book, Owen II just wouldn’t do it. This came after hours of Owen II’s awful work ethic, superiority complex, and solidarity mutterings. Marc had had enough. He also said Owen II repeated his “I wish I could go home and have a cigarette” remark at least five times, some of them right in front of customers. After the workbook incident, Owen II said it again, and that was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Marc ran and told the manager about all the bullshit that had built up to his “ratting” on Owen II, and that is what prompted the manager’s remark. It had more to do with his sassback (I have been waiting almost four years to use that word in a blog entry) about the workbook than it did about the cigarette comments.

To sum up, I sooooo have a new arch-nemesis. It’s only disappointing that in mid-November he’s going to be transferred to a new store (the only reason he was hired to begin with). As with Owen I, his reign as most hilarious villain in the Staniverse will be short-lived, and I’ll have to find a new enemy. How disappointing.

Update 10/11/06: It is my sad duty to inform you, gentle reader, that Owen II’s reign was even shorter than I expected. That Wednesday-night closing shift — our second together — would be our last. He quit unceremoniously and without notice a few days later. What a major disappointment.

Double Update 10/16/06: He also has a MySpace, and he has blog entries tantalizingly entitled “Day Two” and “The Final Day.” I wanted to see if he’d written hostile things about me or anybody else, but…alas, these are “friends-only” blog entries. My life is once again an empty shell with no arch-nemesis-based comedy fodder.

Posted by Stan on October 5, 2006 11:11 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

September 5, 2006

Opinions = Assholes

As I slowly approach that all-important 60-day mark, at which time I will finally get paid to sit in my underwear reading crappy screenplays (formerly just a hobby, along with sitting in my underwear writing crappy screenplays), the gears are starting to grind, and I’m a little more irritable than usual. Also, I smell terrible. What a world.

I’m soon-to-be paid to give my opinion, which I’m currently handing out free of charge (its actual value). This is all I do. I read things, and I explain why I like or dislike it, what could be improved or eliminated, and whether or not the author has “what it takes.” I’m not really clear on the definition of “what it takes,” so I usually skip that part. It seems to be implied that if I actually bother to write full coverage on it (rather than writing a short paragraph explaining how much time I wasted and make suggestions about places it could be lodged, rather uncomfortably, in the human body), the author has “what it takes.” So that’s good enough for me.

Over this past summer, The Manager has cultivated a small group of Actual Clients. I like to think I had a small part in that, because I’ve read billions of submissions, and in general the few that I’ve liked have ended up sending more, and soon they’re sending rewrites, and finally The Manager announces that he’s sending one out to production companies, so let’s hope it’s “the one.” Usually the rewrite stage is where I realize they’re “clients,” but sometimes I don’t even know until he says he’s sent something out. I’m not sure if this is part of the disconnect from doing this job from 2000 miles away, or if it’s part of the disconnect of being an intern nobody cares about.

I want the scripts he sends out to be good. As good as humanly possible, if not better. I don’t actually care about these writers or their scripts; through e-mails mediated by The Manager, I’ve come to realize that — like most writers — they’re a bunch of assholes. Which is fine, because I’m one too, but I want their scripts to be exceptional because at the point when I decide I’ll become The Manager’s client, I want production companies to still accept material from him. Like everything else I do, this theoretical act of selflessness and dedication to an unpaid internship is motivated by greed, abuse, and self-interest.

The trouble started about two weeks ago, when The Manager asked me to take a look at a script that he thought he could “start sending out.” It was a period piece about a guy who can communicate with ghosts. It had some good stuff in it (or maybe I’m just a sucker for period pieces), but there was a complete logic breakdown in the third act. I don’t ask much from horror or action movies, but they least they can do is be sorta coherent from beginning to end; this didn’t deliver on even that meager request. I made a half-dozen suggestions to clarify the problems, which would have constituted a time-consuming, major rewrite. Maybe the writer is some kind of speed-demon (or perhaps speed-freak), but before the week was out I heard it had been sent out.

My infamous friend Mark explained it pretty well: “He finds great high-concept, commercial ideas in terrible scripts, but he seems to think that’ll work itself out later on down the road.” As I say, I’m no expert, but all I’ve ever heard or seen is the opposite: you sell the Earth-shatteringly great screenplay, and then as more cooks start peeking at the broth, it’s slowly ruined as they try to turn it into every other movie ever made.

But long gone are the days of Joe Eszterhas scrawling a drunken, coke-fueled idea onto a napkin and being paid $4 million for it. And those days were never there for the unestablished newbie; simply put, nobody will even buy a script that’s mediocre, much less one that’s flat-out bad. Life’s too short, and believe it or not there are too many good scripts out there to waste time trying to make a bad one good. Part of a manager’s duty to his client, and to himself and that wonderful 15% he earns, is to make sure that client is writing the best possible screenplay, especially a newbie manager who will be breaking through along with his client.

So I was willing to let it slide; maybe the writer came up with some kind of brilliant way to fix all the problems with a few simple changes. Maybe The Manager was even right that somebody will see the potential and they won’t worry about everything that’s wrong with it. I neither knew nor cared. Later in the week, The Manager sent me a screenplay by an author whose previous script I really liked (which had been “sent out,” and I could say with pride that it should have been). It was disappointing compared to the other script, but it had some good stuff. It’s basically the story of a prostitute and a mob enforcer, bookended by elaborate, mob-related goofiness. The beginning sets up way more than it has to for a payoff that basically involves all the mobsters dying.

This was my only problem with it: the relationship is the story, and yet it doesn’t start until the midpoint. The enforcer and the prostitute meeting is the act break; I thought they should meet in the first act, all the pointless mob stuff should be scaled way back, and the relationship should be expanding. In the end, even the mob enforcer dies, but as written, I had a hard time buying that these two people met and fell in love in the 48 hours before he’s killed. I’m not saying I can’t believe that would happen; there’s not enough of them connecting for me to buy it. If there were more relationship, the ending might be easier to take.

Last week, I got a rewrite of the same script. This didn’t surprise me, because unlike the script about the Prohibition-era ghost whisperer, a major revision wasn’t necessary; I saw deleting or changing a lot, then writing a few new scenes. What did surprise me was that…absolutely nothing I had suggested ended up in the script. In fact, with the exception of a few new scenes that just explain more mob bullshit, the script was exactly the same. And the new scenes actually weaken the rest of it — the rare rewrite that’s worse than the previous draft — because they exist solely to explain information that we already know. I wrote The Manager and explained that I think the changes are worse and every suggestion I made in my coverage still stands.

The Manager wrote back that he made the suggestions for the new scenes. He explained his reasons, which actually kind of made sense, but then he said something that really stuck with me: “In the end, I want [the mob enforcer] to live.” I realized that the dying was the problem all along. The convoluted mobster stuff really isn’t bad. It’s unnecessary, but it’s actually kind of interesting at first, until you realize that it’s actually about a relationship and the enforcer’s redemption. And then since that suffers because there’s so much mobster stuff, then that stuff becomes expendable. To me, anyway…

…but if the enforcer lives, that changes everything. I could easily believe everything that happens in the first draft I read, from beginning to end, if the enforcer lives, and he and the prostitute go off to live a quiet life. Even if it’s implied that things won’t work out between them, I could easily buy their entire relationship as the start of something. I just can’t believe it as the whole relationship, especially with the prostitute’s reaction when he dies, like she’s lost her one true love.

But, The Manager went on, the author is very insistent that the mob enforcer must die. Why? I don’t know. He’s a screenwriter. For some reason, screenwriters are obsessed with their main characters dying at the end. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this before, and I even did it once myself before I realized how fucking moronic it is. Nine times out of 10, the “main character dies” ending isn’t earned, just like it’s not earned here. Some movies really justify the hero dying at the end, and the fact that I can’t think of one off the top of my head is evidence that it’s a pretty rare thing.

So, fine, the author doesn’t want to change the ending. All that means is he needs to change everything else. I was a little irritated, though, because it seemed pretty clear that the writer — apparently with The Manager’s approval — dismissed my criticisms. At times like these I wish there were more of a dialogue — preferably not going through a third party like The Manager — so I could really understand what the writer is going for, and maybe help them get there. Of course, whether or not he agrees with me, the mere fact that I say, “This is what the story is” should perk his ears up. If he disagrees, that’s a flaw with the screenplay, not the reader.

I started to think, “You know, if they’re just going to ignore me, I’d really like to start getting paid now.” If they want to pay me for my opinion and then ignore it, that’s fine; but I’d rather not waste my time handing out free advice if it’s not going to be used. Especially when said advice, if followed, will help me in the long run.

But hey, this was just one script. If The Manager really can’t convince the writer to change things, maybe he’s just inordinately argumentative. I could understand The Manager wanting to keep him around for that one really good script, even if his others are crap that he refuses to change. I figured, as long as he didn’t keep doing this over and over, I wouldn’t feel so useless and unappreciated.

And then came a doozy. I still can’t figure out if The Manager ran out of scripts, but over the weekend he sent me something of his own — again! — but it wasn’t even a screenplay; it was a 20-page treatment for the movie version of an established comic-book/TV-series. The first thing I thought was, “Does he even own the rights?” but then I realized I don’t care one way or the other. I read through the entire treatment, and while there was actually a lot of good stuff there, it reminded me a lot of the new Star Wars movies, all three of which failed creatively.

While there are too many reasons to list, a big one (in my opinion) was the focus on tedious intergalactic politics, pre-Empire. You gotta admire the Empire, at least, for keeping it simple: rule everything with an iron fist, and crush all dissenters. Watching Darth Vader strangle a guy from 20 feet away is way cooler than spending seven hours watching Galactic Senate hearings, praying for something to happen, for the love of God…and then when it finally does, it’s retarded, but that’s unrelated. The main thing that sunk this treatment for me was the attention paid to overcomplicated politics that, ultimately, don’t matter to the story a bit. It’s planned as a franchise (i.e., as many sequels as possible), so from beginning to end this is mostly set-up. Hell, the only character that I recognized from the TV show isn’t even born until the end. But here’s the thing about starting off your franchise with a movie that’s all setup for sequels: it will suck. Especially when the core of your story revolves around characters who will be dead by the second movie, dealing with politics on planets that they’ll flee at the end of the first one…

Remember in the first Superman movie, the way they handle Kal-El being sent away from Krypton? It’s 15, maybe 20 minutes at the most, to set up Jor-El, the politics on Krypton, what ultimately leads to their doom, and Kal-El being sent to Earth. This is a similar idea (including the birth of a baby and fleeing the planet), stretched out as an entire feature. I didn’t have the heart to say, “Cut this down to 20 minutes, then start your movie,” but I was honest enough to say that the politics bored me to tears. It’d be so easy to take everything but the essentials and hang the stories on the central relationship, which is pretty interesting, and then you’d have a pretty decent movie loaded with action and tension and drama, instead of people sitting around discussing peace treaties.

I had a few, more minor complaints, but the big thing was the politics. I wrote The Manager back, and he e-mailed me back almost two hours later on the nose with a revised treatment, which he believed I’d like a lot more, but he specifically pointed out that he “could” not address the political situation. Why not? It’s “too essential to the plot.” It is? The revision is almost identical to the first one; the only changes address one of my minor complaints (note that I had more than one).

It irritates me because, especially when The Manager sends me his own material, I see this as a favor to a friend/colleague. I see it as someone seeking my advice because he trusts and values my opinion. It bugs me when I’m totally ignored for reasons that are either unclear or stupid. It’d soften the blow quite a lot if I were at least being paid, but it’d still bother me a little bit. If you’re not going to listen, why bother asking? If you disagree with my opinion, why do you trust it? I don’t get it.

Posted by Stan on September 5, 2006 5:35 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

June 5, 2006

The Load of Shit

Over Memorial Day weekend, my sister called. Usually I avoid her calls like the Plague, but in this case I actually had to talk to her so we could set up file-sharing and she could download some pictures of her house that she thought she had lost. This led, not surprisingly, to an hour-long conversation about my hilarious efforts to find a decent job (or any job, at this point) in an art-related field in which I’m competent. Since she also failed to find employment doing anything resembling what she wanted to do, it’s one of the few areas where she commiserates with me instead of condescending to me.

She gave me all these pointers about her perceived problems with my cover letter and resume (which she hasn’t even looked at — she just happened to take a class in how to make a “bitchin’” resume) and then the conversation gradually turned toward a bombshell she had never before revealed:

“So yeah, a few weeks after you left L.A., I got an e-mail from Cameron asking what happened to you because you kind of fell off the face of the planet,” she said. “He said he’d e-mailed you a couple of times but didn’t hear back, so he was wondering what happened. I told him that you ran out of money and had to go back to Chicago, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s a shame, because he said if you’d stayed another week, they’d have hired you on full-time.’”

At first I was livid. Cam happens to be engaged to my school’s L.A. internship coordinator, arguably the least helpful person on the planet. I was angry first at her for again proving her uselessness by not telling me something like that, then at myself because I kinda blew her off when I got back to Chicago. I was jaded and bitter, but she did call me once; I picked up, thinking it was someone else, but got her off the phone really fast. The last thing she said to me was, “Don’t blow this off.”

In that instant of lividity, I was thinking, did she tell me not to blow this off because when I had called back, she was going to tell me an employment offer had been extended? But as the shock and anger wore off, I gradually began to realize that what my sister had told me made no sense whatsoever, and I explained to her why:

1. As an initial side-note, I pointed out that Cam hadn’t e-mailed me at all after I had left. Not once. And, even after getting ahold of my sister and hearing back from her, I still didn’t hear from him myself.
2. I had given notice at both of my internships. Not a whole lot, and I ended up skipping out earlier than I had told them, which probably didn’t go over well, but they were aware that I was leaving, and they were aware of one reason why. If either of them had intended to put me on full-time, they had ample time to speak up. They didn’t.
3. Of the two internships, Cam’s fiancée only knew of one. Ironically, at the one she didn’t know about I was treated with respect, felt somewhat like I fit in, and was made to feel like I was competent in what I was doing. At the one she was aware of, I didn’t fit in at all. The people there would ignore me if they could, they gave me worse than menial tasks (I know, I know — that’s part of being a lowly intern, but at least at the other internship they didn’t make me feel like I was doing all the piddly crap they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole), and just generally treated me like an outsider. Since this was the only one the internship coordinator knew about, I find it really surprising that of the two, this was the one that intended to offer me a paid position.
4. Before I even gave notice, I took a half-day off from the internship where I didn’t belong so I could go to Santa Monica for an open interview at a café. When I came back thinking the interview went well, the women at the production company were excited that I’d be getting a paying job somewhere and also recommended various other places where I might be able to make more money (none of which were hiring). Doesn’t really sound like the kind of place that planned to hire me…
5. One of my friends worked the exact same internship at the exact same place — she was Monday-Wednesday-Friday; I was Tuesday-Thursday — and she actually got along well with the people there. Yet, she interned there for a whole summer and then, in the end, was cut loose, with the typical promises about how they would have loved to hire her but just couldn’t afford it. I suspected that was how things would end from the moment I interviewed, when the women who interviewed me kept talking about how great the previous interns were, and I was just thinking, “So why did you let them go?” Answer: they didn’t plan to hire anybody; like most places, they just wanted the free labor.

I had always had the feeling that Cam’s fiancée would say or do anything to keep her job or make herself look good, so long as it didn’t involve actually doing her job well. This just seemed to me like proof of that, with the truth hidden even from even her fiancé. It’s not the most unreasonable thing in the world. If I had people breathing down my neck from all sides, saying, “What’s up with this kid who just bailed?” I’d probably make up a similar lie. But I also wouldn’t dangle the lie in front of the other person (or his sister). It’s just more of the school’s empty promises, which had stranded me out there in the first place.

Why wouldn’t I dangle it? Because here’s how I reacted: I said, “It’s a bunch of bullshit and here’s why,” but…it nagged at me. I was in a foul mood for the rest of the weekend, and I let it kind of gnaw at me all week, going back in forth in my head, with a 99.9% certainty that everything Tracey had heard from Cam was a total load of bullshit, but I just couldn’t let that 0.1% go. What if they had wanted to hire me? What if they had intended to offer me a job on the very day I stopped showing up, after giving my two weeks notice one week before? Maybe I was just that much better than my friend who never got hired at all. They had just hired a director of development, whom I actually clicked with, who liked my coverage — maybe she would have needed an assistant. Maybe I had fucked myself out of a nice (to start with) career opportunity for some really, really stupid reasons.

When Friday rolled around, I could no longer tolerate all this horrible, horrible thinking I had been doing. I had to take some kind of action. Should I call up the production company and ask about it? No, no, that’d never work. Maybe I should just call and try to make amends, apologize for walking out on them so abruptly. Not trying to pry any information out of them, but perhaps the information be divulged. “Sorry I ditched you.” “Oh, the only person you fucked was yourself — I was just about to offer you a job.” “Oh, how silly of me. Let us now laugh.”

I stared at their business card, which I had discovered while cleaning out a bunch of old shit, contemplating whether or not I had the guts to actually call them and — gasp! — apologize.

Not today, I thought, and instead sent an e-mail to my friend, the other half of what we jokingly called “Team Intern,” the tactic we had used to get hired together — we knew each other in advance, so we could talk to each other and coordinate the way we ran the office, to make sure everything ran smoothly. If there was something she found out on Friday would happen on Tuesday, she could call me up and let me know. Team Intern, yes, that’s the ticket.

She responded to me a few hours later, quelling my fears and neuroses by reminding me of various other factors that would have prevented us both from being hired full-time. This just wasn’t the place for that. They were a relatively small operation, they obviously wanted to keep the overhead low, so by having two interns in rotation working for three months and then replaced, they had all the additional help they really needed, and for free! In exchange, the very purpose of an internship: payment in experience and maybe — just maybe! — a shiny new reference.

My irritating conscious mind allayed, I was able to continue sending out a resume that, I assume, human resources people print out and hang up on the bulletin board in the break room for everyone to first laugh at, then sigh with the relief one gets in knowing they don’t have somebody like me working for or with them.

Let the good times roll.

Posted by Stan on June 5, 2006 5:15 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (2)

February 23, 2006

The Gambit

When I got into work yesterday morning, I decided that I should finish what I had started working on yesterday. Since the woman who gave me that stack of work is someone who (a) I actually like and (b) is nothing but pleasant to me, I thought I should get it done in case the talk with the Big Boss that I mentioned yesterday didn’t go well.

Also, when I woke up yesterday morning, my anger and spite had diminished, and I really was at a point where I wouldn’t want to continue working there if I had to work closely with Andrea (as I almost certainly would). On top of that, everyone I discussed this with — friends, family, coworkers — agreed that, since I don’t really need this job and it’s really just a way station until I find something that I don’t hate, I should just say “fuck it” and quit. Even my father voiced this opinion, before I even told him about my plan to save face while ruining Andrea, and he was the one most critical about me leaving Los Angeles and most frustrated about me not finding a job within three minutes of getting back to Chicago. These opinions reenforced my original gut reaction, before the spite took over and I felt the need to ruin Andrea’s life — for fun!

With that in mind, I reshaped my mental talk with the Big Boss to reflect my newfound maverick attitude: I didn’t care about saving my job, although I did care about being outright fired, so within that small limitation I could say whatever the hell I wanted. If it forced me into a position where all I could do is quit, boo-fucking-hoo. If we couldn’t possibly work out some sort of compromise to allow me to continue working without having any interaction — even just, say, running into her at the printer — with Andrea, I’d take a walk.

That perspective can lead employers to bend to your will if you’re valuable enough — remember how I accidentally became a legend at Borders? — or it can explode in your face like a trick cigar. And I’ll have you know, I was wishing it would be a trick cigar that doesn’t fire people after the explosion.

The work I had left took me a couple of hours, and when I finished I handed the stack back to the woman who gave it to me. Then, mustering up my courage — yes, despite my carefree attitude, I was nervous about getting caught in a web of Andrea-spun bullshit that would result in my getting fired and looking like a jackass — I marched to the Big Boss’s cubicle, mentally preparing myself for the gambit.

“Big Boss,” I said, “we need to have a talk.”

She gave me a semi-frustrated, knowing look, and nodded for me to sit down. I sat and explained that somebody — I wouldn’t name names — had made me aware of a conspiracy to get me fired, and that I knew the Big Boss knew the two people who had formed this conspiracy because I had already been ratted out. I said that while I admit (very vaguely) that “on occasions” I would “sometimes” leave “a little bit” early or “once in awhile” take a “slightly longer” lunch, I appreciated her giving me the benefit of the doubt and, essentially, telling the conspirers to go fuck themselves, but the conspiracy itself cropped up certain issues that we needed to address.

“Such as…?” the Big Boss asked, seeming genuinely unaware of any problems that could come from my knowledge of the conspiracy.

“If Andrea comes within 10 feet of me, I’ll have to fight an uncontrollable urge to shout obscenities at her,” I responded. “And that, to me, presents a problem because nearly all of the work I do comes directly from her, and unless you start shuffling around everybody’s responsibilities so I don’t have to work with or anywhere near her — which obviously isn’t fair to anybody else in the office — or you can think of some other compromise, I think I should give my notice.”

She sat for a minute, her head cocked to the side like a puppy that’s just noticed a long line of ants marching on a sidewalk, then looked me straight in the eyes.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay”? That was it?! No “maybe we could can the temp and have you go back to doing what you used to do,” no potential solution of any kind, no “when you calm down, we should have some sort of discussion to resolve the issues between you and Andrea,” just “okay, I accept your notice, now leave me alone”?!

“Okay,” I parroted, then added, “Thanks,” for some reason, before I went back to my desk. Thanks for not firing me on the spot, I guess.

After fucking around for a little while — remember, a significant chunk of the problem is that I don’t have anything to do, primarily because Andrea doesn’t give me anything to do, even when I ask her, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask her now mdash; I thought I should brave going somewhat near Andrea in order to thank Athena, who both saved my job — I guarantee you if she hadn’t come to tell me, I never would have figured out the conspiracy for myself and would have ended up getting fired within a few weeks of hardcore spying on me — and gave me the courage to finally quit, even though I have very little on the horizon.

When I left my desk, I thought about going to the temp and saying, “You can let Andrea know I’m going to Athena’s desk, then I’m going to use the can; I shouldn’t be more than five minutes, but if I am, feel free to alert the Big Boss.” And yes, I am that mean, but I decided against it. Why be openly hostile to her when I could save my anger and frustration for Andrea?

I thought I should thank her subtly, because even though I didn’t give a shit if Andrea knew I knew about her little plan, I didn’t want her to hold it against Athena because she told me all about it. Maybe I should have even taken her out to lunch or something, but I didn’t want to give her ideas. Not trying to sound like the office stud (I assure you, I’m not), but I know for certain she’s attracted to me, and it’s not that I don’t feel the same for her — she’s another single mother looking for a surrogate father. And much like her kids’ actual father(s), it’s Splitsville for me when I hear the siren squeal of toddlers.

So yeah, I didn’t want to give her ideas. I thought about taking her aside, maybe inviting her to go “on break” with me, and then thanking her once we’ve reached a safe distance from Andrea, but to be honest, I thought as I walked to her cubicle that if I just said something vague like, “Thanks for your help yesterday,” she’d know exactly what I meant but Andrea would remain clueless.

So that was exactly what I ended up doing. She gave a knowing smile and told me it was no problem at all.

“Stan!” Andrea piped up, noticing my tremendous carriage blocking the entrance to Athena’s cubicle. “Did you finish that work in your ‘bin’?”

Yes, this is the same work she referred to last week, the work that started this whole conspiracy mess, the work that I didn’t do two months ago because I didn’t know how to do it then, and I still don’t know how to do it because she never taught me. At this point, two things happened in my brain:

1. I realized that quitting and blaming her was the right move. On Tuesday, I decided not to quit because I figured that would play right into her hands — she wanted me fired, so if I quit she would win. Now, I realized what a good night’s sleep had force me to suspect: she never wanted me fired — she wanted the Big Boss to threaten to fire me, or maybe even to say she would fire me but then Andrea would come and rescue my job (at which point I would be beholden to her), because she wants a toady. She wants me ot sit there for eight hours, doing nothing if I have nothing, but certainly not sneaking out. When she says “Jump!” she wants me to be there to say “How high?!” But I’m usually sitting in my car, in a parking lot two miles away, reading a Chandler novel. So my quitting is actually the worst thing for her.
2. The anger and spite came back. Oh boy, did it ever come back.

Everybody who knows me is fully aware that I have no skills at all, but I have one magical power that, when used for evil, can simply destroy a person. You talk about emotional scarring — this is emotional disfigurement. Okay, maybe not. Maybe it’s just scarring, but it’s usually something people remember. Maybe not on a constant, I-have-to-kill-that-Stan basis, but definitely in a periodically-flashing-in-their-mind-and-reopening-the-wound kind of way.

I can, most of the time, size up a person and, within minutes of observation (even if I’m not talking to the person — just watching them silently fidget from across a crowded auditorium) size up their character. I say “most of the time,” because on occasion I learn from others (often when bitching about a person I barely know and grossly mischaracterizing them) that I’ve been wrong, but usually I’m so right it’s spooky. And I don’t usually use this power for evil — much like Harry Block, I just exploit it for creative gain — but sometimes I’m prompted or feel compelled to rip into a person, and that’s when it all comes out.

The problem is, when I’m angry at a person, and the compulsion to start yelling at them overwhelms me, I just destroy them. Because part of the instanalysis of their character includes full awareness of their fears and insecurities, and that’s what you hone in on when you’re mad.

So obviously, as I trundled around to her cubicle and spoke very quietly and rapidly to her, I started laying into her about her insecurity about this job — how part of the reason she wants to “control” me stems from the fact that she’s fully aware that I could do her job with my eyes closed and still sneak out for five hours a day — and ended, through a long procession of obscenity-laced browbeating, launched into a tirade about her fear that her husband is cheating on her with — gasp! — an American woman (she’s South American). I didn’t even know about this fear in any specific way. I could just…tell.

And the way she looked at me when I started talking about that, especially her prejudice against “white” people, made me know I was dead fucking right. At the same time I felt triumphant, I knew I was the worst person in the entire world. Incidentally, this magical power is the reason why I instinctively dislike almost everybody on the planet.

After I finished speaking, Andrea said nothing. She just sat there, jaw agape (especially at the end). I turned back to go to my desk and caught a glance at Athena, who I could tell was looking at me the same way I looked at myself: with a combination of pride and horror. Then I turned back around to say what I realized I hadn’t even gotten to — the actual response to her question — so I said, “I haven’t done the shit you gave me because, as I’ve already told you three times, I. Don’t. Know. How. To. Do. It. Okay? You have the invoices, you’re the one who never taught me — you do it!” This was the only time, during a tirade that felt like half an hour (it was more like two minutes), that I raised my voice.

I went back to my desk and, once again, fucked around for a few minutes, at which time the Big Boss came to my cubicle. She told me that I’d made Andrea cry (I figured…) and perhaps I should just go. No hard feelings, she wouldn’t give me any black marks or even give me a bad reference (this led me to believe that the Big Boss felt Andrea deserved what she got from me), but she’s not going to put up with two weeks of me making other employees cry. It was interesting to me that she said “other employees,” not just Andrea. Did she know there were a few other people I really didn’t get along with? I don’t have to work directly with any of them, at least not on a regular basis, so I’d really have no reason to say anything to them, but that’s fair enough.

I thanked the Big Boss, took my cabinet keys off their chain and set them on my desk along with my ID badge. I shut down my computer, grabbed my jacket and slipped away down the stairwell next to my cubicle, as I had done so many times while sneaking out over the past several months.

I doubt I’ll ever see any of these people again — disappointing, since a couple of them (like Athena) seemed pretty cool — but if I see Andrea, I doubt our next encounter will be any better than our last one.

Posted by Stan on February 23, 2006 8:51 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

February 21, 2006

The Conspiracy

There’s a scene in All the President’s Men where, and I’m going from memory here because it’s been several months since I’ve watched the movie and a few years since I’ve read the book, Deep Throat tells Woodward that he and Carl Bernstein are being bugged and to be careful what they say. Woodward immediately goes to Bernstein’s apartment, and when Bernstein opens the door with a jovial “hello!” Woodward silences him immediately by placing his index finger over his lips. He turns on a Vivaldi record and types the information he received from Deep Throat.

I always love it when my life turns into a movie, especially a ’70s conspiracy thriller, but reenacting that scene today was almost too much.

There’s a woman at work, Athena, who I’ve kinda been buddies with since we started. Not bestest, share-all-our-secrets buddies, but we share daily moments of friendly banter (which is more than I can say for most of these drones) and occasionally, when we can get away from the office, have lengthy bitch sessions about what a miserable fucking job we share. It’s cool. So she came up to me in my cubicle today, while I was working on closing out some invoices. I was listening to music, so I paused it and gave her a jovial “hello!” She silenced me immediately by placing her index finger over her lips. Unfortunately, I had neither a record player nor a Vivaldi record, and the computer is a poor substitute for the endless rattle of a typewriter, so she just stood there, about three inches away from my ear, whispering as quietly and monotonously as possible (in fact, she didn’t even take pauses for the commas and periods that I’ve added — it was just one steady, rambling stream):

“Andrea [my direct supervisor] is having Joanne [one of the new contractors, who happens to sit near my cubicle] spy on you when you leave your desk and come back, writing down when you come in late* and leave early and take long breaks, stuff like that, and she’s been reporting it to the Big Boss. I don’t know how long it’s been going on, I think only a week or two, but I thought I should tell you because I don’t want you to get fired. The Big Boss said she didn’t want to fire you, and she wouldn’t because she didn’t have anything concrete, but if you keep it up she probably will, so you really gotta straighten up because Now They’re Watching You.”

Je…sus…Christ. I’ve always been what many people — including myself — call “paranoid,” but as I’m often quick to point out: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean They’re not after you. But this kinda rattled me. After she told me, and just walked away as if nothing had happened (I acknowledged her with a stunned, wide-eyed nod, so she understood the message was received), I was literally shaking with fear and anger. I was so pissed — not about getting caught taking a lot of “personal time,” but about the way Andrea went about it, as well as her reasons for it** — that I considered giving my notice on the spot. I’ve had enough of this fucking shit-ass job, and the money’s nice, but I’m at a pathetic point where I don’t really need it — what little money I would spend over the months and possibly years searching for another job could come directly from the ever-increasing nest egg I’ve stockpiled so that I’ll have some “wiggle room” before I move out. The only thing I’d change from the equation, if I quit, is the “move out” part.

But then I decided if I quit, the terrorists would win, and I can’t have that. “Fuck her,” I thought, and then I hatched a rather simple scheme for revenge: she is, if you read the double-asterisked footnote, trying to “make an example of me” or something to mask the fact that the work she gave me was her responsibility to begin with. I enjoy the poetic justice in approaching the Big Boss as soon as I get in tomorrow morning, an hour or more before Andrea’s start time, and laying it all on the line: my unethical extended lunches and early quitting times; my awareness of the conspiracy against me and my side of the story, which will in large part damn me but will mostly take Andrea down further than I’ve ever gone; the fact that I’ve only had a few “catch-all” things to do for the past month, in large part because she (a) hoards her work like a maniac and (b) clamored and conned her way into too many temps, thus depriving me of said work because she’s doling it out to all of them to justify the necessity of all these extra people; and that I’ve done good work in the past, and will continue to do good work, as long as I have something to do. I’m guessing there’s something personal in there — I’ve been generally pleasant to her, but I really can’t stand her, and maybe she realizes it and doesn’t want to work with me. I can’t really figure out any other reason — work-related or otherwise — why she’d launch an offensive to get rid of me when we could, much more easily, get rid of a temp.

So if the Big Boss has a problem with any of this, I’ll put in my notice and leave without a fuss. Hopefully she’ll accept that over firing me, which reflects badly on both of us (or maybe just me…I’m gonna go ahead and hope “both of us”). I’m thinking, though, that while this is kind of a gamble, the end result will be “a semi-severe reprimand for Andrea, followed by the dismissal of a temp and an increase in work for me.” The only forseeable problems are my obsession with finding a better job (and if I do, I am soooo out of there, which might burn a few bridges with the Big Boss if she plans to get in my corner) and the consequences of admitting that I’ve essentially been a slacker. I’ve been hiding the information, rather than going to the Big Boss directly and immediately, because let’s face it: I’d much rather sit in my car reading a novel for three hours than sit in a cubicle slowly melting my corneas. I’d risk this shitty-ass job for the privilege of doing that, because I’m any Conspirer’s worst enemy: a Gambler. But, as it happens, I’m a Really Shitty Gambler who rarely thinks of consequences beyond my own immediate gratification. So I’m gonna go in and bluff, and I’ll either win, lose, or fold like a cheap card-table and leave in shameful silence.

Wish me luck!

*I make no bones about leaving early and taking long breaks, but I’m never more than five minutes late, and usually I’m there before Joanne. But whatever.

**Dateline: Late November 2005 — Andrea hands me a stack of work for our end-of-the-month close, but as usual, she didn’t sort through it carefully and handed me a bunch of crazy shit that I have no idea how to do and don’t know who to give it back to, so I handed it back to Andrea and told her the problems, and she…did nothing. Now, in mid-February, she sees all of this work in my computer “bin” (this, to me, is the equivalent of her coming into my cubicle and rooting around in my filing cabinets to dig up dirt) and demands to know why it hasn’t been done. I explained, in a polite but mildly condescending tone, that I gave her this work to do months ago, and if she intended to blame me for not getting it done, she’d better bark up a different tree. She took her frustration out on me, by forcing me to sit in her cubicle for four hours while she attempted to process two — of eight — invoices, showing me how to do both of them. I have no problem with learning new things, but she pretty much abandoned me shortly before I had to leave anyway, so I went home. The next day, she brushed past my cubicle on her way to, I assume, conspire with Joanne, and she asked, “Did you finish that stuff in your ‘bin’?”

“Um,” I replied, but she kept on going, somewhat unwilling to hear a negative answer. So I let it go. She has the hard copies; she can finish it. But I suspect my unwillingness to, uh, do work that I can’t feasibly do has…pissed her off, and she wants to take me down to prevent her from looking bad. I have no evidence to confirm that this is her reasoning, but the time-frame lines up and it’s really the only time she’s ever gotten pissy with me.

Posted by Stan on February 21, 2006 4:33 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

February 19, 2006

The Cover Letter

With my recent failure to land a job still stinging, I’ve decided to adjust my method for job-hunting. Applying for dozens of jobs in a given day seems like a good strategy on the surface, blanketing the universe with my resume, in the hopes that a few places will get back to me, but I have to face facts: I’ve received three requests for interviews in the past two months, and because of my willingness to apply for virtually everything, the two I decided not to interview for were either part-time or a shit job that I probably wouldn’t have applied for had I read the listing more closely.

And most of this, I believe, has to do with my sketchy, working-around-college-classes employment history, and the fact that I’ve essentially created a generic cover letter template that makes it easy to add a sentence or two to tailor myself to what they’re looking for and a few blank spots to add a company name and job title, so as to create the illusion of originality. It doesn’t really explain too much about me or why I want the job, or why I think I can do the job, because when you’re applying for that many jobs, it gets extremely time-consuming. As it is, I fall behind in sending out the applications because what little I do to alter the cover letter (and occasionally alter the work history) takes awhile.

And then, at random, I got an e-mail from my cousin. She’s a few years younger than me, and she was going to film school briefly but decided to drop that to go to the community college while doing as many internships as she can. Lucky for her, she grew up just outside of New York City, so there are a lot of internships to be had.

The e-mail she said was a correspondence with some internship guy in west New Jersey. I’m not sure why she sent it to me — she’s worked half a dozen internships before, and she’s mentioned them in passing, and I didn’t see anything special about this one that would necessitate sending the entire correspondence. But I’m glad she did, because her initial e-mail contained an astonishing cover letter, whoring herself to the fullest, going into an excess of details about why her work history sucks, why she dropped out of film school, but why she’d be totally awesome for this internship. I know from experience that, when there are a lot of internships available, they’re exceptionally easy to get — the 450,000 interviews I had in Los Angeles are a testament to that — but I’m not going to tell her that, because she’s proud and pleased as punch. I congratulated her, because it is awesome. If nothing else, I’ll have some coattails to ride in a few years when she actually gets paying industry jobs.

But the main thing I focused on was that ingenious cover letter, and I realized what mine was missing: heart. I’m basically sending a generic form-letter, tailored on the surface to a job but still utterly generic. Worse than that, it does a pretty horrendous job of selling me, which is the purpose of the cover letter.

This e-mail also happened to correspond with a writing job I found for a new MMORPG, produced by a reputable company outside of Seattle. Now, personally, I think MMORPGs are about the lowest of the low as far as video games are concerned, but I do think it’d be fun to write one. More than that, it’d open a couple of doors in the nerdy world of writing video games, so perhaps I could work my way up to writing for a cool game.

But here’s the problem: I don’t know shit about writing video games. I imagine it can’t be terribly different from writing screenplays, which I know how to do, but I was sending a piece of short fiction as my writing sample. I realized for this job, which I really want, I need to exploit pretty much everything I have to offer. It ain’t much, but it works: I have the work history in Seattle, so I can hop on the idea that I’d love to move back there (I wouldn’t, but I also wouldn’t say no, which is why I’m trolling for jobs out there); I’ve got the brief but seemingly impressive work in Hollywood; I have my college career and the illusion that I’m a young go-getter; and I have my writing sample, which will hopefully provide evidence of versatility in my writing (it’s not a screenplay, though college and internships prove I know that realm; and I made up some bullshit about the idea that an MMORPG creates a universe, which essentially was what I did in the story).

In short, I rambled on about why I felt I could do the job, but I did so with an excess of what my cover letter previously lacked: a desire to do this job to the best of my ability, and totally personalized for this one job. Since then, I’ve done that with five or six other decent jobs I’ve found. I’ve only started doing this on Friday afternoon, so we’ll see if it actually works or if it’s another dead end. I have to assume that, once again, my laziness did me in, so I hope that rectifying said laziness will help. Probably not, but a man can dream.

Posted by Stan on February 19, 2006 5:10 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

February 15, 2006

Tanktop Lady

There’s this middle-aged lady who annoys the crap out of me by merely existing. Both of my regular readers know that this isn’t an unusual occurrence. What is unusual, I guess, are my reasons why. I only have two:

1. To quote Roseanne, she has a voice that bends steel. She has one of those heavy South Side accents at just the right frequency to torture my ears. On top of that, I’m convinced that (much like me) she doesn’t do any actual work; she just wanders from cubicle to cubicle, all day long, yammering as shrilly as possible. I don’t think she’s doing this specifically to drive me nuts, but…she drives me nuts anyway.
2. She’s constantly overheated. I’ll admit, the office isn’t exactly cold, but I’m a fatass who sits around in flannel shirts all day (on the rare occasions I work all day), and I don’t break a sweat. So for somebody who’s little more than skin and bones to get hot enough that she feels the need to traipse around all day in a tanktop, it’s…just weird. But she has this weird air like she’s metaphoric hot stuff (as every man in our giant compound rolls his eyes in unison), so she wants to show off. “If you got it, flaunt it,” unfortunately, lacks a contingency plan for those who think they’ve got it but…don’t. At all.

In the grand scheme of things, these issues aren’t huge. With the exception of escaping through the stairwell right next to my cubicle, I try to avoid leaving my cubicle as much as possible, so I don’t generally bear witness to her traipsing around in less clothing than anybody else in the office. And when I do hear her voice — well, sometimes even turning up the headphones isn’t even enough, but usually it can drown her out. So really, her annoyance factor is minimal.

That doesn’t mean I’m not gleeful when she gets busted down a notch. Call me mean, call me bitter, call me the unrepetant king of schadenfreude: I love it when bad things happen to people I dislike. Especially when I dislike them for ridiculous, superficial reasons. Somehow that makes it sweeter, as if it’s confirming my superficial reasons have merit.

So last week, we had a staff meeting. These are, by and large, utterly boring and a complete waste of time. When some new people took over the department a few months ago, they threatened to have weekly staff meetings but, thank God, that plan fell by the wayside. We actually haven’t had a staff meeting since they announced (then retracted by email a few hours later) that we’d be having them weekly, and I think that was way back in November. So a few hours every four months isn’t so bad.

But seriously, one of the items on the agenda was: “Dress code reminders.” Dress code reminders? Are you kidding me? Does anybody even violate the dress code?

Answer: yes. One single person in the department violates the dress code, and she — and only