The Slime of Your Life

[Tagutcow]

From: Dog Kick Semiotic
Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology
Subject: The Slime of Your Life
Organization: The po-po can't touch us.
Message-ID:
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 01:03:26 GMT


And I hope that you are having the time of your life,
But think twice, that's my only advice.
Come on now, who do you, whodoyou whodoyou whodoyou think you are?
Ha-ha-ha! bless your soul!
You really think you're in control!
- Gnarls Barkley

UNNECESSARY PREFATORY NOTE:

A few months back, I made friends with a little black and white cat who
lived a few blocks from me. It would happen on a daily basis, as I
walked to the playground in his neighborhood, that he would come join
me, sometimes bounding up to meet me if he saw me from fifty feet away.
I would pet him and scratch him behind his ears and even sometimes
frolic with him, to the extent any adult human can meaningfully be said
to "frolic". When I sat down on the bench, he would eagerly jump into my
lap and sit there, purring and writhing in ecstasy for as long as it
took me to get restless. He had no way of knowing my intentions, yet his
trust in me was total.

I couldn't help but feel that this little black and white cat gave me a
window to the entire human condition. What did this cat want from me but
what every person wants from any form of social interaction-- what, for
lack of a better word, I'll call affection. ("Affection" is too warm and
cuddly a word, "attention" too icy and detached, and both resist any
attempt at Derridean portmanteau.) What do people who contribute to
internet newsgroups want? What do the people loitering around the bar
after the lights come up want? What did this cat want from me, but that
which he couldn't give himself? I don't mean this in the mundane sense
of simply depending on another living being for something otherwise
necessary; rather, the fact that he depended on another living being to
give him this affection is precisely why it was necessary in the first
place-- if he could have given it to himself, it would have been
valueless.

I can't help but feel that my remove from the standard social
experience- the same remove, certainly, that affords me time aplenty to
frolic with other peoples' cats- is what allows me to make an
observation on human nature that might strike people as profound yet
indefinably alien, or maybe it is this same remove that simply renders
me unable to recognize the utter conventionality of said observation.
That my cat anecdote was a powerful and illuminating way of opening up a
text, or a mawkish and jejune way of doing so, are both equal
possibilities in my mind.

What follows is a chronicle of a time in my life where I am slouching
towards functionality, of a time where, the more normal my life becomes
on the outside, the less normal I often feel on the inside. This in turn
raises the possibility that the sure grasp on human nature I thought I
had was never actually so sure, which in turn exacerbates a certain
sense of loneliness. But I think anyone who's truly been lonely will
tell you loneliness can be as sweet as it is bitter, and that it can
sometimes be reassuring to feel one's sure place in this grand legacy of
lonely. The sense of belonging is always colored by the contingencies of
time and place, but loneliness is the Authentic Experience- the very
absence of those contingencies- experienced the same way universally
since the beginning of time. It matters not whether you're Phanerozoic,
Sumerian, post-modern, feline, or Venusian; the loneliness you feel is
always the same lonely. Loneliness comes in any color you want as long
as it's black.

But I am determined not to fall in the trap of self-absorbed whining
for which internet readers have criticized me in the past. Chastened, I
put forth the following not as a personal diary made public, but as a
Chronicle of Post-Millennial Life in America. I am donating my body to
soft science; my diary is documentary. Similar to how the black and
white cat was a pinhole in a pinhole camera projecting a larger truth
about human nature, perhaps when one writes about one's life, one's life
becomes the pinhole in a pinhole camera of one's time and place. Perhaps
the smaller and lonelier this life, the more detailed the picture that
comes through the other end.

* * *

I was already forty-five minutes late, and didn't know enough not to
care. My parents and I were searching in vain for Pharmalabel on
Industrial Avenue, when in fact it was located on Industrial Village
Road on the opposite side of town. Eventually we discovered it in the
maze of business parks surrounding the airport. I ran into the front
office, explained who I was, and was told that I was in the wrong part
of the building. I hopped back in the car and we drove around to the
rear of the building where I saw a man smoking a cigarette on a loading
dock. I hopped back out of the car and explained myself; he told me to
follow him. I waved my parents goodbye, and walked after this man
straight into a solid wall of noise.

The constant machine noise in the building was beyond my threshold of
comfort, and to hear anything that was said by the remarkably
unattractive Good Ol' Boy tasked with showing me the ropes of my new
job, I had to put my ear directly at his mouth, night club position, my
line of sight perpendicular to his.

"I'm sorry, you're gonna have to speak a little closer to me," I
explained, "I'm not the best hearer in the world." "You're gonna be the
*worst* hearer in the world when you're done with this job!" he replied.

After a while he passed the task of ropes-showing on a still more
remarkably unattractive Good Ol' Boy. After answering some of my
questions, there was a brief moment of repose, and he continued, "I
guess we're what you'd call the niggers of this operation. Wait, let me
think of a better word for that..."

Pharmalabel, expectedly, is a printing press for pharmaceutical labels.
Once certain parts of a press got dismantled after a print run, it was
my job to wash the inky parts off in giant sinks. Washing the ink off of
draining pans was tricky because of all the little crevices, but washing
the funnels was criminally easy, as was the case with the "ink stirrers"
(which I could have *sworn* were just toothbrushes with the bristles
pulled out). More problematic, however, were the blades they use to
scrape the ink off of the cylinders. The blade was housed in a metal
apparatus the size and shape of a laser printer toner cartridge, and one
had to be careful not to cut one's finger when scrubbing off the little
screws and crevices surrounding it. To clean the blade itself, one
doubled the washcloth over and carefully ran it down its length. I was
repeatedly warned that the blade was extremely sharp, and would slice my
finger to the bone if I slipped-- rather, I should say *when* I slipped,
as I was assured this had already happened to everyone else. As Good Ol'
Boy #1 warned me, "the blade doesn't care what it cuts."

Next to the sinks, someone thought to plug in the type of cheap boombox
you'd get at Best Buy for $39.95, now splattered with multicolored inks.
The boombox was playing 102 Jamz at its distorted maximum volume,
resulting only in an even louder constant noise dabbed with intermittent
smudges of chroma and pulse. In order to "listen" to a song playing over
the radio, you'd have to already be familiar with the song so your brain
could fill in the 90% you couldn't actually hear. Helping me wash the
machine parts was a younger black guy. At one point he asked me, "So are
you going to stay here?" "I don't know," I said, "I don't like jobs
where I can hurt myself, plus all this noise will be bad for my
hearing." He told me how he got used to it, and how he was working there
two months before he got sliced, and subtly begged me to stay.

I already knew I wasn't coming back-- that was the only thought that
got me through the day. I didn't want to work at a hot, steamy,
uncomfortable job. I didn't want to work a job where physical injury is
a certainty. I didn't want to work at a job that would make my already
bad hearing even worse-- especially for a musician, that would be far
too great a price to pay. Only later did it occur to me that the reason
this guy was wheedling me was most likely because he was lonely at the
job, and I was the closest thing he would have had to a compatriot.

When the shift was over, I discovered that I couldn't clock out because
I was never properly clocked in; showing you *those* types of ropes is
never a high priority in these types of places. I went up to the
manager- a surprisingly unweathered Latino man wearing a "WJJD"
necklace- and explained that there was some confusion concerning my
timecard. He said he'd correct it. I also told him I wasn't planning on
coming back, and he wished me well.

When the check finally came, I was happy to find I got paid for the
full eight-hour shift despite my lateness. Jesus is just all right with
me.

Sometime before this, I had made the acquaintance of a guy at Solaris,
the club I typically go to on Friday nights. He had recently moved back
in town with his folks and didn't have any remaining friends around
Greensboro, so I was sympathetic to his cause. About two weeks after our
initial meeting, Adrian drove me down to the terminal stop of
Dieselboy's 'Human Violence Tour' in Charlotte and got me in for free
since he was buddy-buddy with some of the local DJs playing on the
ticket. After I once again found myself jobless, I broached the topic of
my employment situation, and as an additional favor he promised to put
in a good word for me at his place of employment, T.G.I. Fridays.

One I managed to get a sit-down interview with the general manager, I
was given the job on-the-spot without ever having to show a previous
work history or references. I was told to show up next Tuesday wearing
black pants and black shoes. I said something about that condition being
a problem for me, since I had neither, which led to some unnecessary
confusion between us. Sometimes I say nervous things even when I'm not
consciously aware that I'm nervous. "Calm down, dumbass," I said to
myself, "you've already got the job."

The excitement I feel in getting a new job- and the pride I feel in
having gotten it- is evidence, at the very least to myself, that I am
capable of a trait known as "endearing naivety."

I showed up the next Tuesday and got seated at a table with another new
trainee, a very attractive- and also very short- Polish woman whose
first name was so problematic that Kim- the kitchen manager who was
training us- convinced her to Anglicize it from "Edyta" to "Eddie". As
Eddie and I were filling out the requisite enormous amount of paperwork,
a friend of Kim's tasked with feeding Kim's toddler sat across from us.
Now it is possible that this woman is the kindest, most charitable
creature who ever walked the face of the earth, and I'm not so
superficial as to think that the types of haggard, meth-addict-looking
women you'd expect to see standing on a boulevard median somehow carry
less value as a human beings, but the immediate and profound impression
this particular woman gave was that of being white trash of the most
repellant stripe-- certainly not the type I would ever want to expose a
child to.

"Numnumnumnum... here comes the helicopter!" she said as she spoon-fed
the child, "numnumnumnum!" With every single "num," from the child's
head were sent tiny fractions of IQ points fluttering to the floor like
hair clippings. At the same time, this woman was eating lunch herself,
and as she ate she made the type of repulsive smacking noises that just
make you clench every muscle in your body. "Numnumnum *sMacK*
numnumnumnum *smAck* *SmaCk*" I was of a mind to politely ask the lady
to eat more quietly, but it occurred to me that this might be the kind
of "Men in Black" field test where the apparent exercise is not the one
they're actually grading, and that if I expressed any irritation at all
with this woman, I would have failed this customer-relations meta-test.

Eddie and myself were given the choice of being a busperson or a
waiter/waitress; I was led to the former, and she was led to the latter,
and those were the positions we eventually accepted. I admit I didn't
even know what a busboy was prior to that day; I'm not really a member
of the restaurant set, and it was a source of some nervous amusement for
two of my friends a few months previous when it became obvious that I
had no idea how to pay a restaurant bill.

Eventually, the unpleasant woman left, leaving me and Eddie by
ourselves. At some point we just kind of looked at each other and smiled
and shook our heads in a tacit expression of "Oh dear, what have we
gotten ourselves into?" I never saw Edyta after that day, most likely
because someone realized that it's more trouble than it's worth for Joe
AnyAmerican to have to repeat his order for a Sizzling Triple Meat
Fundido five times to a waitress struggling with American pronunciation.

Edyta really is a beautiful name, though. Try running it through Google
Images.

In the interim between the application process and the start of my work
schedule, Tiffany from the temp agency that sent me to Pharmalabel gave
me a housecall-- a first!
"I have a job for you, Robert."
"Actually, I already got a job."
"Really!?! Where at?"
"T.G.I. Fridays."
"How much does it pay?" she asked. The unexpectedly invasive nature of
this question caused me to stammer a bit in my response-- "Um, well,
about three fifty an hour, but we get tips on top of that."
"Well," she had me know, "this job pays Seven. Fifty. An hour."
The way she said this, it's almost as if she expected me to respond
with, "HOLY SHIT! $7.50 AN HOUR!?! OH BLESSED TIFFANY, IN HOW MANY WAYS
CAN I GIVE YOU THANKS? BUT PLEASE, NEXT TIME YOU SPRING NEWS LIKE THIS
ON ME, ASK ME TO SIT DOWN ON A TOWEL FIRST!"
What I actually said was, "Foul woman! I have yet to flush the acrid
taste of that last turd of a job from my mouth! I rebuke thee, Tiffany,
and all thine empty promises!" and then emphatically slammed the phone.

No, actually, that didn't happen either. What happened was that I
meekly responded, "Well I'm already scheduled to go in. I don't think it
would look good if I dropped it now."

I started my job bussing tables at T.G.I. Fridays. I'd stand at the
side of the restaurant with Adrian- occasionally with a third busboy on
the busy days- and we'd wait for tables of people to get up and leave,
at which point we'd swoop in and throw their dishes, glasses, napkins,
complimentary crayons-for-the-kids, and shameful amounts of uneaten food
into our bus tubs. We'd take the bus tubs back through the kitchen, back
to where the dishwashers worked, and we'd toss the plates and serving
platters into separate stacks for the different sizes of plates, throw
the utensils into a vat of water, the shot-glasses of dipping sauces in
another vat of water, place the unbreakable plastic cups into a
honeycomb-pattern rack, breakable glassware into a different kind of
rack, and the ridiculously oversized girly margarita glasses into still
a third kind of rack. As for everything else that went into the bus tub,
we were supposed to dispose of liquid waste separately from solid waste,
so in the beginning I had to manually dredge as much solid matter as
possible from the remaining unholy mlange of ice cream, napkins, bones,
Pepsi, shrimp tails, pink lemonade, steak sauce, fudge, liquor, and
crayons. Over time, I developed a system for loading things into the bus
pan that made the process of disposal a great deal less messy and time
consuming.

The two primary dishwashers were both Mexican immigrants; one was a
little superanimated Chihuahua of a man who had a tendency to make- in
jest, one would hope- sexual advances to people working in the kitchen,
but most of all to a painfully shy, slightly plump black man with an
unnaturally high-pitched voice, often taken to singing diva-ish R&B
songs in the most shrill and amelodic way possible. Twice I witnessed
this dishwasher jump on this waiter's back and completely straddle him
from behind. He also made repeated references to his "big cobra". Once,
while pointing to his (thankfully unexposed) genital region with both
hands, he asked someone, "Do you like my cock and balls?"

The other dishwasher was a man named Israel, or, alternately, Speedy
Gonzalez. He had this tendency to let the dishes stack up and up and up
before finally scraping them off and moving them to the dishwasher.
Sometimes the situation got to the point where you'd have three busboys
suspending their very heavy bus tubs between their torsos and the
counter (since there was no space remaining on the counters to rest
them), awkwardly bending over, attempting to sort the dishes in such a
way as to cause neither the dishes nor the bus tubs to go crashing to
the floor. Then, in a virtuosic display of hot-doggery, Israel would
make his appearance and start moving the dishes with superhuman speed;--
hence his sobriquet. The first time I saw him do this, he looked at me
and asked, "Do you think I am Speedy Gonzalez?" I'll admit to being
blinkered enough by political correctness that I was hesitant to answer
to the affirmative for fear I was walking into a trap. He had no problem
with being Speedy Gonzalez, however; apparently the consequences of
calling a Latino "Speedy Gonzalez" are less to be feared than if, say,
you called a black boy "Sambo".

Once I arrived for work on far too little sleep after a late-night
party that left me in a Strangely Confident mood, and I asked him, "What
makes Speedy Gonzalez so speedy?" In response, he simply raised his
index finger to his right nostril. Yes, T.G.I. Fridays is fueled on
Mexican labor, which is in turn fueled on Colombian cocaine. If we were
ever successful in preventing the flow of either into the United
States... well... I won't go to so far as to say T.G.I. Fridays will
grind to a *complete* halt, but c'mon-- *every* day is Friday!?! Get
real!

I should also mention that that the female clientele of T.G.I. Fridays
seemed abnormally hot, and that those perfectly inaccessible hotties
sitting at such-and-such a table were always a topic of discussion among
the busboys. If any ladies reading this ever have the unpleasant
sensation of being ogled by the busboys, it's probably because you are.
Please understand, however; you get to go out to a restaurant on a
Friday night, we have to *work* in a restaurant on a Friday night. Why
would you deny us this, our one small shameful pleasure?

Incidentally, I had to work late Friday *and* Saturday nights, which I
began to feel was too great a social sacrifice for the money I was
making. As well, there was a timecard issue that went unresolved for
about three weeks, as well as other issues with my job. Since Adrian
had recommended me to the management, however, I at least owed it to him
to give T.G.I. Fridays my two weeks notice.

On my last week there, I was asked by the FOH manager if I would like
to do the "Happy Hour" shift in the bar. I was initially excited about
this possibility since I thought the job simply entailed bussing tables
in the bar section, and since the Happy Hour shift was from 4:00 PM to
7:00 PM, that would free up my evenings. On my first day of Happy Hour
duty, I put on my plastic gloves and grabbed my bus tub, but Kim saw
this and looked at me funny. No, it turns out, Happy Hour was something
quite different indeed.

The first step in working Happy Hour was to get the big table from the
dry storage closet, carry it through the kitchen, through the narrow and
heavily trafficked space behind the MACROS systems, through the bar
area, and set it up in the far corner of the restaurant. This table was
roughly the size of a massage table, and while it didn't fold across its
length, its legs did fold in underneath it, and one was supposed to
carry the table by the crossbeams between the legs. Unfortunately, the
space between the crossbeams and the underside of the table was too
narrow to allow me to thread my fingers through, so I had to grasp onto
it with my fingertips as the weight of the table crushed my knuckles.
Additionally, the table had a red plastic ruffle around its edges whose
functional purpose seemed only to be to trip me as I attempted to carry
it. Were the table shaped differently, Happy Hour would have been a
Passion Play.

(A side note: Once while eating in the GTCC cafeteria, I was approached
by a student who was casting a play written by another student. I
expressed initial disinterest, but he eventually cajoled me into at
least looking at it. After lunch, I walked to the office where they were
doing the casting and glossed the script; it was a Christian play aimed
at the high school set, and the dramatis personae included The Popular
Kid, The Pastor, The Wayward Kid, The Cheerleader, The Drug Pusher, and
none other than Jesus Christ himself. I told them I'd sleep on it, but
good sense had already reassumed control by that point. A day or two
later, this student again confronted me in the cafeteria, and was upset
at me because I never followed-up; I offered him some tepid excuses in
return. It was only sometime after this that I realized he was most
likely upset at me because he had me pegged for a very particular role.)

After I had set up the table, I then had to go through an approximately
37-step process to end up with seven salad bar modules filled with
different condiments, nestled into a huge open cooler filled with two
buckets of crushed ice, alongside plates and utensils, on top of a
tablecloth stretched over the table because the ruffle wasn't decorative
enough by itself. All these components were scattered in different
places around the restaurant, and I was apparently supposed to have
committed to memory what components to get and where to find them on
that first day.

Oh wait... the chicken! I forgot the chicken! And the oil! And the
portable propane burner! I's a-pan fryin' chicken fajitas, yes'sum I is!

Oh yeah... I'm a vegetarian! I've never fried anything in my life! I'm
probably the most dangerously unqualified person in the entire
restaurant- employee *or* patron- to be doing this! Making me do this is
an act of criminal negligence!

For the three hours I spent there, I made *two* chicken fajitas, *both*
for employees. At 7:00- around the time people actually start filling
into the bar- I had to take all those pieces and return them to where
they belonged. The only money in my tip jar was the dollar bill I put
there myself. Nobody ever told me what my wage would be; when the
manager was clocking me out, he got a puzzled look on his face and asked
me, "So do I clock you out as 'FOH Training' or 'Host/Hostess'?"

The next day Kim was too busy to help me set up Happy Hour. I spent a
great deal of time standing around because I didn't know where to find
certain things, and as time went on I began purposefully dragging my
feet just because I was pissed off. Forty-five minutes after Happy Hour
was supposed to be operational, Kim asked me why the table was nowhere
near set up, and I said "I thought Happy Hour lasted an hour-- six to
seven." "No, Happy Hour is from four to seven," she responded, knowing
full well I was being all anarchic and insouciant and shit. Adrian, who
was standing nearby, clenched his teeth and made an expression of "Wow,
I really don't want to be here!" Eventually, Kim got more active in
helping me set up, although I did kind of lash out at her for asking me
to close a bag of lettuce with the resealer when she never told me where
the resealer was in the first place. Sometime after 5:00, the Happy Hour
table was entirely set up; I was severely disappointed in myself that I
couldn't manage to be more inefficient.

Then something strange happened. It was the same thing that happened on
one of my last days at the phone bank, a sort of delirium occurring when
the immense shittitude of your job completely short-circuits your
ability to feel sorry for yourself, and you enter into such a
delightfully loopy state that you wonder- however fleetingly- why it
ever had to be unpleasant in the first place. Perhaps this state was
triggered by something; perhaps it had something to do with the fact
that, since the day before, an enormous flat screen television had been
mounted to the ceiling no more than ten feet from where I stood, and in
such a way that I was the only one who had a direct line of sight to it;
perhaps it had something to do with the fact this television was showing
"The Jerry Springer Show".

Mind you, there's nothing terribly new or shocking about the sight of a
morbidly obese woman from the studio audience attempting to shame a
person on stage with her superior skills on the stripper pole- I've seen
things like this a million times before- but perhaps it was only when I
was a position of humiliating myself that I could truly appreciate, in
all of its richness, this woman humiliating herself to a still greater
degree. My anarchic insouciance had now turned into an anarchic
enthusiasm. I had now decided that I was Fajita Boy, and would tell my
co-workers that I was "bringing about one world peace one Fajita at a
time." If any customer inquired about the unexplained reappearance of
Happy Hour, I would have happily informed them, "We had a Fajita Boy a
few months ago, but he died tragically in a fajita-related accident." No
customer ever did, which is just as well since the joke was, in
retrospect, too Letterman-esque. My newfound anarchic enthusiasm did not
prevent a twinge of sadness when- having eventually prepared fajitas at
the request of a handful of customers- I could only imagine them keeled
over the toilet later that day, the tragic result of improperly reheated
chicken.

When I quit T.G.I Fridays, I did so without a backup plan of any kind,
either personal or professional. My poofy artistic pursuits have fallen
to a state of epic dereliction. My daily routine basically involves
taking long walks, doing pull-ups, and compulsively checking web message
boards. I typically go out about five nights out of the week and get
stupid drunk, but am making scant progress with meaningful social
contacts. By now, I've blown the funds I built up from my stint at
Fridays on expensive "street couture" t-shirts, designer jeans, and a
$60 ceramic straight iron. High-dollar purchases give me- somewhat
disturbingly- a sense of accomplishment, and I'm of the mind that senses
of accomplishment and addictions are two faces of the same beast. On the
plus side of it all, I look like a million dollars.

About a week after getting off from Fridays, I got a call from the temp
agency again; it turns out the Ralph Lauren warehouse is looking for
workers again. Ralph Lauren was my favorite job; there was something
relaxingly straightforward about stacking boxes on a tram, wheeling the
tram around the warehouse, and sorting the boxes away. The physicality
of the job allowed me to work off my natural fidgetiness, and having to
put fifty-pound boxes on high shelves caused me to buff up during my
time there. It was also a lonely job; the African immigrants mostly
spoke amongst themselves in French during the breaks, although I did
participate in a few games of Dominoes with some of them. After my time
there was up, I was left wanting a job with a little more human
contact-- particularly humans of the English-speaking and female sort.

I walked into the temp agency on the scheduled day, and pretty much the
first thing she told me was, "You won't believe how relieved I am to see
you today, Robert." Apparently, everybody was applying for Ralph Lauren;
almost nobody there spoke English as a first language, and several
seemed barely able to speak English at all. As she was trying to extract
information from an African immigrant who didn't understand what she was
asking, she rolled her eyes completely back in her head and said
"Father, give me strength." I felt a little twinge of bewitchment at the
way she hammed up her exasperation, kind of like a hotter version of
Melissa Joan Hart.

Or did she say "Robert, give me strength"? I really can't say for sure,
since "Robert" and "father" do sound so much alike. I will tell you,
however, that before yielding to my superego, which notched it down to
the more socially acceptable "Father, give me strength", my
superduperego sure as hell registered it as "Robert, give me strength."

I was sent into a side waiting room with the other applicants fill out
some redundant paperwork, waivers, and tax forms. Tax forms are easy for
me; any space that isn't to remain blank gets filled with a zero. When
Tiffany walked into the room, the first thing she did was to pet the top
of my head.

What? What's that you say? Banish such thoughts from your mind,
faithful reader! This is a woman who is engaged to be married, after
all; I'm just a guy she's relieved to see on hectic days who always
makes her laugh. Oh yeah, and when I first met her at a bar months
before I ever saw her at the temp agency, she called me hot more times
than many guys get called hot in their entire lives. But no, it's a
non-starter. Her engagement notwithstanding- as I joked to a person-
asking a girl who's seen my employment history out on a date is like
asking your urologist who knows you have a two-inch schlong out on a
date. (I hesitate to add that the person I "joked to" was my mother.)
The thing about it all, however, is that- in my total life experience of
being flirty with women, so scant as almost not to be believed- if ever
there was a woman I did everything *right* with, it would be her.

The date of my employment with Ralph Lauren approached with mounting
dread. The shift would have gone from 5:00 PM to 1:00 AM every weeknight
and some Saturdays, effectively bulldozing my social life. I was
planning on taking a trip to the outer banks in August, and I probably
would have had to blow off three full days of work to do so. As well, I
was told the warehouse would get exceptionally hot during the summer,
and sweating plays hell with my skin. I continued my regular routine of
talking long walks during the day and getting stupid drunk at night, all
the time with increasing apprehension. Finally, two days before I was
set to go in, I pegged Tiffany a call.

"PRG Staffing, this is Tiffany, how may I help you?"
"Hey, Tiffany, this is Robert Caponi. I was wondering; I'm set to go to
Ralph Lauren in a few days, but I might have some conflicting
appointments coming up in a few weeks, and I was wondering what kind
notice I would have to give if I'm unable to complete my time there?"
"What do you mean?" she asked me.
"I might have another job coming up, and I'll probably want to go back
to GTCC."
"Well if you're unable to complete your time there, we'd prefer if you
didn't come in at all."
"Well then I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to go in," I said with
the shit-eating satisfaction of a boy who knows his teachers knows he's
lying, but knows he'll get away with it anyway.
"*sigh*, Okay, let me put you on hold..."

I was left alone with oldies muzak playing at a level barely beyond the
threshold of audibility, a line noise dabbed intermittently with smudges
of chroma and pulse. After about a minute of this, the other end picked
up again--

"God help you Robert if you can't take this job."

--
robert caponi | my mother has
MAIL mailto:[e-mail] | boogie-woogied
DUMB http://www.myspace.com/tagutcow | her way to a
SMRT http://home.earthlink.net/~tagutcow/ | slimmer figure