The Odd 1s Out--The First Sequel

by James Rallison

  Sometimes, however, you should turn into one of those difficult customers and demand your money back. This, unfortunately, is part of being an adult. Not a part you look forward to, like driving, buying spray paint, and having politicians pander to you. No, this is a part of adulthood like the moment when you realize you’ll have to buy your own groceries for the rest of your life.

  * * *

  • • •

  What I thought my life as an adult would be like:

  What it’s actually like:

  Recently something happened with a business that got on my nerves. I didn’t pull the “Let me speak to your manager” card, but I could feel my inner–mom instincts kicking in and telling me, “You should threaten to give them a one-star review on Yelp!”

  My apartment lease ended on the tenth of the month and I was moving into a house on the fourteenth. Since I didn’t want to pay a bunch of money to extend the lease for an extra month, I hired a moving company to take all my furniture and put it in storage, which meant that I would technically be homeless for four days. Here’s my advice to anyone who’s thinking about being homeless: Don’t do it.

  When it was the fourteenth and I got to sleep in my house, I had nothing but Floof, an air mattress, and the shirt on my back (I lost my pants). I always keep an air mattress in my trunk in case of emergencies. Learned that my first day on the streets. Of course, an air mattress is only helpful in emergencies when I also have access to an outlet, because I have to plug in the mattress to inflate it.

  That first night in my house, I got to experience what it’s like to be a minimalist, but I’m not going to lie, I still felt like I was homeless.

  Anyway, the movers called me and said they would deliver my furniture on the fifteenth, between seven and nine a.m.

  I said, “Sounds good,” and set my alarm to eight o’clock, thinking that, statistically, I would be fine.

  Floof woke me up with her barking at seven o’clock when the movers arrived.

  After the men had been unpacking their truck for a while, I felt weird standing around not helping them so I decided to make small talk.

  “How much more stuff do you guys have?” I asked one of the movers.

  “All that’s left is the couch and the armchair,” he said.

  “And my mattress, right?” I asked.

  The man looked puzzled. “Uh . . . no. There’s no mattress in the truck.”

  These same movers had carted my bed away less than a week before. They’d brought in and put together my bed frame, but somehow they didn’t think it was strange that there wasn’t anything to put on top of it.

  I didn’t worry that much because I figured the movers must have my mattress somewhere. It’s kinda hard to misplace bed-size objects. And it’s not like my mattress could’ve run off. I made sure to cut off his legs as soon as I bought him.

  I thought I would just have to make one phone call to customer service, and the moving company would find my mattress in the storage unit or hiding underneath someone’s bed and they would deliver it without any problem.

  But instead, customer service told me to fill out a damaged or missing items claim on their website. The movers had taken pictures of everything they put into my storage unit, so they should have had all my items in a database. I looked through those pictures, though, and my mattress had never been documented. As far as the movers knew, I owned a bed frame without a mattress.

  I figured that since my (ex-)roommate moved out on the same day and used the same movers, the movers must have accidentally put my mattress in his unit. He was getting his furniture delivered a couple days later, so I texted him about my predicament and made sure to use plenty of emojis so he knew how serious the situation was.

  That night as I slowly nodded off to sleep, I dreamed about seeing my mattress again and the many comfortable nights soon to come.

  In the morning, I called customer service again and told the receptionist my theory. She looked into my roommate’s account and asked, “Can you describe the mattress in a way that confirms it belongs to you?”

  Usually I’m very good about describing mattresses, but for some reason this time I drew a blank. What did she expect me to say—“It lies around and answers to ‘Mattress’”? Instead, I said, “Can you just tell me if there are two mattresses in his unit? Because I know for a fact my roommate only uses one mattress.”

  She said, “I’m sorry, I can’t disclose that information.”

  What?! Why not? It was a mattress. I wasn’t asking for his social security number.

  So I did my best to describe the mattress. “It’s rectangular shaped and has some pee stains on it.” I should’ve clarified they were from my dog. I don’t have that problem anymore.

  The receptionist said, “Oh, actually I do see a mattress that fits that description. If it’s yours, we’ll move it to your account.”

  Problem solved . . . probably.

  When my old roommate finally called, I asked him to check his inventory to see if my mattress ran off with his.

  He sent me his inventory pictures and he had only one mattress listed. I knew it was his because it had his social security number burned on the side.

  I hoped the reason he only had one mattress was that the company had caught and corrected their mistake.

  Day 2 on the couch.

  My mattress never showed up in my account. My roommate got his stuff delivered that day, but the movers didn’t have a second mattress on their truck.

  “Where’s my mattress? Did it fall off the truck? Did the lady lie about seeing it in the first place? Does she even work for the moving company? What was her name again? Denise? What did you do to my mattress, Denise? Are you trying to sabotage my sleeping schedule? Where is my boy?”

  I called customer service again, and calmly and sleep-deprivedly told them everything that had happened. The unconcerned person said I needed to fill out a form and asked me to provide a picture of the missing item.

  I looked on my nightstand for the framed picture of my mattress that I usually keep with the picture of my vacuum cleaner and my toaster, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I guess the movers lost that too.

  I googled “mattress with black trim” and used a picture of a $3,000 mattress. Because, hey, maybe I would get lucky and they’d find a better mattress for me.

  I wanted to add to the missing-item report: “I won’t rest until I get that mattress, because I need it to sleep.”

  After I submitted the form, I got an email saying:

  Your claim is currently being reviewed by an agent who will work with you to resolve this as quickly as possible. You can expect to hear from your claims agent within 2 business days.

  Problem was, it was Saturday. The business days don’t start counting down until Monday.

  Day 4 on the couch.

  I decided that every night I had to sleep on my couch, my review of the moving company would go down one star.

  Around two p.m. on Monday after not hearing from my agent, I got impatient and called customer service for the fourth time. The receptionist told me there were no new updates on Matty the missing mattress.

  I heard the words form in my brain. I could’ve said them right then. Just six little words and all my problems could be fixed.

  “Let me speak . . .”

  I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So instead I passive-aggressively wrote a chapter in this book.

  When this sort of thing happens to me, my friends never give me any sympathy. After I told them about my AWOL furniture problem, they all said, “But it’s great material for a video.”

  Sometimes I don’t want material. Sometimes I want to sleep on a bed.

  As I was complaining to one of my friends, she said, “James, aren’t you going to have a guest room in your new house?”

  “Yeah,” I said.


  “Won’t you need to buy furniture for it?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “Why not just buy the guest bed now?”

  And that is why you need friends—to point out obvious solutions to you. I’m a little embarrassed how many nights I slept on that couch. I went to a mattress store that day and bought a brand-new bed for the guest room. They delivered it to me the same day and I finally got a good night’s sleep.

  So technically I was my own guest.

  It took the moving company a whole week to find and deliver my mattress. I don’t know where Matty was, or what happened on his adventure, but he came back with a passport, a suntan, and passable Spanish.

  And then to add insult to injury, the moving company had the audacity to email me asking for a review. Thanks for reminding me.

  Sometimes doing the adult stuff isn’t easy. It involves making phone calls, talking to strangers, and filling out forms—none of which I enjoy. In this case, I did everything wrong, except for listening to my friends.

  Chapter 15

  Things I’m Supposed to Like but Don’t

  Society expects everyone to like certain things, but some of those things don’t exactly tickle my fancy, if you know what I mean. I guess you could call me the odd one out. (I make these jokes because I care about you.)

  Granted, there are people who take pride in not liking something to the point where it becomes toxic.

  A person who thinks this way feels that they have more refined tastes than the average person’s and are therefore above the status quo. I like to call these people “hipsters.” They need to learn to let the average person enjoy average, pathetic things.

  What I’m trying to say is that I don’t mean to come off as an elitist. Since this is a list of popular things I dislike, many of you will think I’m wrong. That’s fine. I’m not trying to change your opinion, I’m just trying to write something you’ll find entertaining.

  If you’re feeling concerned that I’m about to start bashing things that you enjoy, here are some things that I like that you also like:

  Puppies

  Reading a book that a YouTuber wrote

  Macaroni and cheese

  The lights aisle at Home Depot

  Cracking your back

  Going to the bathroom after holding it in for a while

  Some TV shows

  But not all TV shows. One TV show I’m not a fan of is this show called Football. This show has been going on for fifty-four seasons, and honestly, I don’t see the appeal. Episodes are repetitive, the writing is confusing, the cinematography is flat, there are too many characters to keep track of, and I can’t relate to any of their struggles. Also, for some reason, they all want to hold this oddly shaped ball. I must have missed the episode where they explained why it’s so important.

  Football episodes always have a huge live studio audience at the tapings. The audience is so big that a lot of times they can be seen in the shots—which I wouldn’t mind if the audience wasn’t screaming every time the show started to get interesting. Whenever Football airs the season finale, I get invited to viewing parties and people cosplay as their favorite character. I always go because of the free food, but I’m never caught up in the show, so it’s hard for me to get invested. Oh well, at least the commercials are entertaining.

  Because of the success of the show, it’s spawned a huge number of spin-off shows.

  Now that I’m thinking about it, in Handless Football the characters use their feet more than the characters in plain Football, so calling this show Football and naming the original Football something else would make a whole lot of sense. What if instead we made an acronym to describe handless football. How about: Society Of Cool, Constantly Energetic Runners. S.O.C.C.E.R.

  I’ve had plenty of people tell me, “James, Football isn’t a fictional narrative with plots and characters. Those aren’t actors; they’re professional athletes playing a sport.”

  But that just got me thinking about the word “sport.”

  Speaking of sports cars, I’m not sure why some car models are called sports cars. As far as I can tell, none of these cars are involved in playoffs or can hit a ball in any direction. Unless your car happens to run over a S.O.C.C.E.R. ball. Not that I’ve ever done that. At least not that I’m going to tell you about.

  Most guys my age like sports cars because they have flashy high-tech features. They make sounds like “zoom” and “ka-chow” and “nnyyooooommm.” They can go from zero to sixty miles an hour in negative-two seconds. Maybe I’d be impressed with those numbers if I drove on an airport runway and could actually go that fast. But no. I live in California, where traffic moves a little faster than your average ice-cream truck full of open glasses of milk.

  Sports cars are also super expensive. In fact, despite their horsepower, they’re much more expensive than a horse and they love you less. Using horses might be slow, but at least you’ll get good gas mileage. A sports car costs approximately the equivalent of a college education or 123,000 sticks of butter.

  I think I’m just not into that rich-boy lifestyle. What’s the point of paying more for something just so that people know you paid more for it?

  Not only do some people buy unnecessarily expensive clothes, they also expect the rest of us to wear outfits where our shirts match with our pants. I don’t know who made these rules or why we let them dictate fashion, but apparently you’re not supposed to wear two different patterns, and your colors are supposed to coordinate. Unless you’re wearing jeans. If you wear jeans, you can wear any color and we all pretend it matches with navy blue.

  I think I talked about how I don’t understand fashion in my first book, but I’m very passionate about these feelings.

  The thing about me, though, is that I don’t want to wear any clothes that are less comfortable than pajamas. As soon as I put on a pair of pants, I think about how long it will be until I can take them off again.

  If you’ve been agreeing with everything I’ve said thus far, don’t worry, you’re really going to change your mind when I say that I’m not a fan of stories in video games.

  The first video game I ever played on my parents’ old Macintosh was Lode Runner. In the game, you’re a robber trying to steal money bags all while these cops you can outrun chase you. Also you have the power to make holes in the ground by pressing the A button, and if a cop happens to fall into your hole, you can walk over him. Just like in real life.

  Lode Runner had all the story a game needs: Steal bags of money and run so fast you don’t get caught. The game had a hundred different levels but I could never get past level 6. Luckily I knew the cheat code that let me skip any level.

  I was perfectly content with that lifestyle. Because when I play a game, I want to play the game. I don’t want to watch an unskippable cutscene and then be told, “Now, go here to watch another cutscene. Hey, idiot, pay attention to this cutscene because there’s going to be symbols flashing on the screen and if you don’t press the corresponding button fast enough your character will die and you’ll have to watch this cutscene again!”

  Maybe someday I’ll play a video game that changes my mind, but right now I think that all the story a video game needs is: Go save the princess. And that’s the exact story to one of the highest-selling video game franchises:

  Shrek.

  Last on the list of things I’m supposed to like but don’t is literally every book I was forced to read in my high school English classes. People complain a lot about being forced to take math. You always hear them say stuff like, “When am I ever going to use the Pythagorean theorem in real life?”

  Do you know how many times I’ve used my knowledge of the symbolism in The Scarlet Letter? Never.

  Which is a good thing because I did not retain anything that was in that book.

  In ninth
grade, I had to read Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and it was the most boring book ever. No action, no saving princesses. It was all about philosophy and living in nature. Thoreau obviously didn’t live in Arizona or he wouldn’t have had a pond to write about and living off the land would have been a lot harder.

  Fun fact: While he was living in the cabin, people from the city brought him food, and his mom did his laundry. If I went to live by a pond, I’m pretty sure my mom would not do my laundry.

  I recently decided to give one of the classics another try, so I read Lord of the Flies (because I lie to myself that I’m the sort of person who can appreciate mid-twentieth-century British allegorical fiction). The book is basically a commentary on human nature. And granted, anyone who’s ever been shopping on Black Friday may wonder how quickly people can revert to savages, but I really think the author had an unnecessarily pessimistic view of people. The schoolboys get along for a little bit, but then two characters get in a fight and almost immediately this group of twelve-year-old schoolboys are painting their faces, decapitating wild pigs, and killing each other.

  When I was a scout, I went camping in remote woods with other twelve-year-old boys all the time. Sure, our scoutmaster was there, but we never fought, unless we were pulling pranks on each other, or unless one boy had some candy and I wanted it, or unless we played “the stick game,” where we had to push each other out of a circle drawn on the ground, or unless a friend and I filled up a ziplock bag full of water and threw it on top of some kid’s lean-to, or if there was any body of water—then we would all try to push each other in no matter how shallow it was.