by Rob Gunther
Dear potential employer: I see that my previous groundskeeper is looking for a job. Do me a favor. Not only should you not hire this no-good, lousy, incompetent piece of garbage, but see if you can’t rough him up a little while you’re throwing his sorry ass off your property. Don’t read this out loud, because he might get scared and take off running. If you’re already reading this out loud, just start hitting him right now before he totally makes a break for it. If he calls the police, tell them he was trespassing. Tell them he stole my platinum pen. The shitty one. I know he stole it. That son of a bitch. Read that part out loud, so he doesn’t get any ideas about calling the cops.
Tomorrow I think I’ll wake up and have some caviar for breakfast. Some whale caviar. Well, I don’t care if whales aren’t fish. Get me some unfertilized whale eggs before I really start to lose my patience. Yes, of course I just fired you, and do you think I’ll ever rehire you if you’re just standing around not doing what I’m telling you? Just get me some goddamn breakfast. I’m starving. I don’t care what time it is. I’ll have breakfast when I want breakfast.
One time somebody was reading me the newspaper. The article was about how a fisherman off the coast of Africa caught an unusual specimen that hadn’t been seen in centuries. Aristotle wrote of it, but scholars had assumed it had long ago gone extinct, until now. I wanted this fish. I needed it. I had dreams of making the world’s most expensive fishamajig sandwich. I imagined harvesting its eggs to spread on toast for a mid-afternoon snack. None of my dimwitted employees could get me that fish.
“What if we catch a male fish?” one of those idiots asked, totally getting ahead of himself.
“Well, then sample its DNA, clone it, keep breeding it and manipulating its genes until you have a fish that can get me some rare caviar. Why is it so difficult to do as I say?”
I fired half a dozen employees that day. One of them had a pregnant wife. Or so he claimed as he was begging to me, pleading for his job, crying for his family. It was pathetic. I’ve never seen a grown man weep so hard, like a little baby. I gave him a hard smack on the way out. I taunted him, go ahead, call the police. He did. When they showed up, I took out all of the ivory toothpicks. I made it out like he brought them to my house from whatever country he emigrated from.
I hired the most expensive lawyers to throw the book at him. I’m talking literally. I went to my library and fetched my first edition, leather-bound copies of Europe’s greatest writers and poets - Keats, Shakespeare, Wordsworth - and I had my lawyers throw each book at him, pummeling him until he was good and bloody. Then I hired even more expensive lawyers to prosecute him, defamation of some of western civilization’s most expensive works of literature, crimes against humanity.
I can’t believe the police, those sniveling toads. They just stood there and watched my lawyers bludgeon this jerk with my entire collection. Even they were scared of me.
Note to self: buy more Wordsworth. Note to self: Buy more policemen to work at my house. Note to self: I’m serious, write these notes down! Who do you think I’m talking to! Stop standing around like an idiot and get to work! Write this down! Every single word! Get me some cheese and fish eggs! I want a snack! Right this second!
Stuck in an elevator with five guys and one pizza
Last week I got stuck in an elevator with five other people. Luckily, one of them happened to be a pizza delivery guy and, you guessed it, he hadn’t yet delivered his pizza. I immediately informed the group that this pizza represented our only chance at survival if the elevator were to remain stuck for an extended period of time.
The delivery guy tried to brush me off, saying, “Let’s just hold on for a second,” while somebody else tried pressing some of those emergency buttons on the wall.
One of the buttons worked, the one that rang that alarm bell. It was an actual bell, and it was definitely attached to the elevator that we were stuck in. I told the guy to stop pressing it because it was super annoying. He protested, arguing that somebody outside would hear the ringing and call for help.
“Call who? Who are they going to call?” I was getting impatient. “You’re just like one of those idiots who starts blaring their horn in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There’s absolutely nothing to be done about the situation except annoy everyone else with a really loud noise. Now can we please get back to this pizza while it’s still hot?”
I saw the pizza guy pull in his box a little tighter. What kind of a pizza place sends out its pies without one of those thermal bags? It must be from right down the corner. Which led me to another question: who the hell would order delivery from one block away? That’s just lazy. Come on, take a five-minute break and stretch your legs. You’ll save money on the tip. No, whoever took the time to make an actual phone call to a pizza place right downstairs, asking them if they’d send up an employee to deliver their pizza, they probably wouldn’t be worrying about a tip anyway.
It was actually a good thing that someone was lazy enough to call because otherwise I wouldn’t have been in there with that pizza. But then again, if that person had just gone downstairs, maybe I’d have had to wait for an additional elevator because I’m a gentleman and I always insist on holding the doors open for everyone else. Then I wouldn’t be stuck. Someone else would. I’d be stuck upstairs for a few minutes, waiting for an elevator that wouldn’t be coming, but I wouldn’t be literally trapped like I was right then. I would have given up eventually and taken the stairs.
But no thermal bag? That’s a shame. We could have all waited half an hour, forty-five minutes, tops, before we had to address the food situation.
“Just back off, all right, buddy?” the pizza guy warned me.
Please, don’t warn me. What’s a warning going to do in a situation with six people stuck in a tiny elevator? “Here’s how it’s going to go,” I announced. “We each get one slice, while it’s hot. It’s the only fair way.”
Because who likes to eat cold pizza? I do. I actually like cold pizza. I don’t prefer it over hot pizza, but it’s still good. I don’t like my pizza to be piping hot, but just you know, five, five to seven minutes out of the oven. Room temperature pizza is great too. I’ll even eat it cold out of the fridge. I’ll even eat a frozen pizza out of the freezer. I’ve never done it, but I could. I could just let it thaw until it was room temperature. Or I could just chomp on it still frozen, just biting and swallowing.
That wouldn’t be ideal, but I could make it happen in an emergency. And that’s what this was, an emergency. I was pressing the pizza issue under the guise of its temperature, but I was really just trying to force everyone’s hand, make a move, right now, for the first round of pizza. I’d make it out to be like we’d divide it, evenly, and that everybody would get to either eat their slice right away, or save it for later. I was counting on the fact that most people weren’t currently dying for a slice of pizza. Hell, I wasn’t even that hungry. I just ate like five tacos.
But I’d eat my slice right away, thereby starting at an advantage of an even fuller stomach. If we wound up actually being stuck in there for a while, everyone else would probably wisely save their slice for when they got really hungry. And in that situation, I’d think about the two extra slices in that box. Because there are only six of us, but eight slices of pizza, seven if you discount the slice that I was planning on having eaten immediately.
Then when everybody else finally broke down and went for their rations, I’d protest, “Come on! There are two perfectly good slices right there. I deserve one. I finished my slice yesterday. I didn’t think we’d be in here this long. You can’t all just eat pizza while I’m starving. I’ll go crazy. I won’t allow it!”
And people would tell me stuff like, “Well, you shouldn’t have eaten your slice right away. In fact, you were the one who told us we should eat our slices when we wanted to.”
And that would just drive me into a rage. I’d start the craziest confined quarter temper tantrum until somebody would say something like, “Fine, just
give it to him. Jesus.” And that way I’d get two slices.
But eventually there’d be the issue of that last slice of pizza. I thought, I’ll probably have to wait to make a move, but I could press it a little faster if I could convince everyone that we didn’t have too much time before it spoiled. In which case I’d insist on a lottery. It would be silly to try and divide the last piece. First of all, nobody had a knife. It would be a mess. Secondly, there’s no way one sixth of a slice of pizza is going to satisfy anybody’s hunger. Better to give it away to one person.
Of course I’d rig the results. But everyone would be so famished, delusional with hunger, that they wouldn’t be paying attention to me fixing the contest. Only I would have my wits about me because I’d have two slices of pizza digesting in my stomach, buying me just enough time to outwit everyone else. I’d win, I’d grab the slice, and then I’d have eaten three slices. That’s how you do it. That’s called making the best out of a bad situation.
But I thought about it a little more and, actually, that plan wasn’t really the best. There was a whole pie in there, and there had to be something I could do to have it all to myself. I immediately shifted tactics, which was tough, because I had already made such a big deal about us being stuck in there for potentially forever. But now I was all like, “You know what? I’m actually pretty sure I hear people working on the elevator. We should be out of here in twenty minutes, tops.” I could eat a whole pizza in twenty minutes. “So, wait a second,” I continued, “you know, I actually ordered a pizza before I got on. I think that’s for me. Going up, right? Yeah, that’s totally my pizza. So why don’t we just settle up right now, if you don’t mind, this is my lunch break, and I’m afraid my bosses won’t let me take more time, because I always pull the broken elevator routine and, well, you guys know how it is, right? Here you go.”
The guy protested, but I was way more aggressive. I shoved a twenty in his face and grabbed the box. As I got into my third slice, I thought, this is awesome. I’m like a king here. I’ll out-survive everybody else in this elevator. But then the doors cracked open. It was two guys with some crowbars.
“Jesus!” the one guy said. “Why didn’t anybody press the alarm button? You know that’s the only way people know to call for a crew, right?”
And everybody filed out, and I was stuck with a totally not-so-hot pizza that I paid for. My next trick was going to be getting my twenty bucks back after I had eaten the pizza, but I guess that wasn’t going to happen.
And then I went up to work. I felt so sick from eating the whole pie, and my boss was like, “Rob! What the hell? You can’t just disappear for half an hour at a time! And to think I ordered you and your coworkers a pizza for lunch. Good thing that idiot delivery boy didn’t even show up. I called up the pizza shop and apparently nobody in your generation knows how to work because they couldn’t find him either. I hope they fired that good for nothing piece of …”
And I just had to sit there and take it, because I had already pulled the stuck in the elevator excuse last week. That’s something you can’t roll out too frequently, because the first time, the boss just thinks, that sucks, but the second time, in a week, he starts complaining to the super, “What’s with the elevator breaking down twice this week?” and the super looks at him and goes, “Twice?”
Howdy folks
I want to start saying howdy. Howdy folks. I wonder if I just start saying it, will people give me a reaction? I won’t even try to ease it in. It’ll just be like one day I’ll wake up, go to work, and when I get to work, whoever sees me first and goes, “Hey Rob,”
I’ll just throw back, “Howdy.”
I’m picturing this playing out in my head and I’m wondering if that other person would give me any response. Probably not. If somebody said howdy to me in the morning, I’d just think to myself, well that had to be about as painful as this day is going to get, and so maybe I’d be relieved. But I’d really just be glad to be away from whoever said it.
Let’s say I say howdy to somebody in the morning and I don’t get a reaction. So I keep it up. I keep saying howdy to everyone I see that day. Are people going to start talking amongst themselves? “Hey, did Rob say howdy to anybody else this morning?” Or am I overinflating my already inflated sense of self, just assuming people are even paying attention to me in the morning, let alone having side discussions about my greetings?
I have to reverse the situation again and imagine somebody else saying howdy to me. I’d totally ignore it. I’d think to myself, well, somebody sure wants a little extra attention today. And I’m not going to be the one to give it to them. But it would eat away at me inside. Howdy? Is that person even from Texas? Do people really say howdy in Texas or is that just something they do on TV?
Every once in a while I’ll meet somebody new and we’ll have a totally regular conversation and maybe ten or fifteen minutes into it I’ll ask, “So where are you from?”
They’ll be like, “Oh, Charlotte” or “Dallas.”
And I’m just like, what? You don’t even have what I imagine to be a Southern accent. And so I’m lead to believe people don’t really talk like that in real life, you know, with the drawl and the “Hey, y’all,” and the “Howdy, pardner.” Either that or the effects of national TV have finally changed all regional accents, making everybody talk the way everybody talks on TV, which is what I just assume to be regular.
But even that’s not the case, because I live in New York, and I don’t talk with the whole stereotypical New York accent. I’d try to write it out phonetically, but that’s what other people do when they’re trying to make fun of New York online, like on message boards and stuff, and I always think to myself, I don’t know anybody that talks like that in real life.
Well, even that’s only partially true. Sure, I’m not personally friends with anybody who talks like they just walked off the set of Tthe Sopranos. But every now and then I’ll run into somebody who lays it on pretty thick. And I always think to myself, all right buddy, I get it, you’re out New Yorking me. This is something I’m very sensitive to because I didn’t grow up in New York City. I grew up like five miles across the Queens border on Long Island. It’s always this tough situation: I’ll come across somebody who’s all about New York, born and raised NYC, much more New York than me, the I-never-leave-New-York kind of New York. And what do I do, do I fight it? Do I embrace my Long Island roots?
Honestly I think all of my problems might be solved by simply incorporating howdy into my everyday vocabulary. It’ll give people a bunch of mixed messages that I won’t ever feel inclined to explain. I started this nonsense imagining everybody’s individual reactions. But even if nobody said anything, even if everybody just pretended to ignore it, there would come a day weeks after I’ve started saying howdy on an individual basis where I’d walk into a room with several if not all of my coworkers, and I’d say something like, “Howdy folks. How’re y’all doing today?”
And maybe nobody would say anything. Maybe they’d be like, “Where did Rob grow up? New York? Long Island? Atlanta?” But again, I’m probably over imagining the whole thing. And really, I’m reading this back to myself - because that’s what I always do, I read it out loud to make sure it sounds natural - and I can’t get through it. I keep getting stuck on the howdy, like I just can’t get myself to say it. That’s probably what would happen in real life. It would just sound awful, ridiculous, and people would start to hate me.
But it’s silly to make fun of how we talk. It’s all English. And sure, it’s easy to caricature the differences, but we’re all more or less on the same page. Although it’s funny. I’ve never met anybody who had a really Boston-like Boston accent. I’ve seen videos of JFK talking and I’m just like, what’s wrong with that guy? Did he have a stroke or something?
Thank you, thank you, please, sit down
Nobody get up. Please. Well, since you’re already up. Thank you. I’m honored, really. Please, everybody, take a seat. Stop throwi
ng those roses. Come on, I’m going to blush! Save the flowers. Wow, those are a lot of flowers. Everybody brought flowers? Did you all coordinate how you’d throw them, not all at once? Because this is like a continuous cascade, like, if I were in your spot and I had brought a bunch of roses, I’d start throwing them immediately. But this is incredible, like a nonstop wave of roses. It’s beautiful, I’m humbled, thank you.
But, all right, enough already! Please, sit down everybody. How are you all still clapping? I haven’t even noticed a break in the applause, not even with all of the roses being thrown. I would have imagined it impossible to sustain such a prolonged round of applause while simultaneously reaching for the flowers and throwing them on stage. We only have two hands, right? But this is amazing. It’s like, I haven’t noticed any change in the intensity of the clapping at all.
Seriously, where are all of these flowers coming from? Again, I’m humbled. Really, I never dreamed, but it’s just … logistically, where did you get all of these flowers? I’m like ankle deep right now. There are only maybe two or three florists even somewhat close, did everybody call in advance or something? Hello. Yes, we’d like to order dozens upon dozens of roses. No, even more. Well, call up your florist buddies from out of state and have everything trucked in.
And there aren’t even any thorns. I’ve never waded knee deep in long-stemmed roses before, but I would’ve imagined at least one thorn. You’re telling me that whatever florists prepared these flowers, they managed to cut off every single thorn? And the precision in which they’re all trimmed. It’s a testament, really, to the profession. To the flowers. To you, to all of you. Thanks for coming out, thank you for your standing ovation, thank you for stopping the clapping, for a minute, just one second, sit down, please. Can anybody even hear me over all of this applause? Are my words making it through? Or does it just look like I’m basking in the extended cheering, the whistling, and still, the roses. I’m just at a loss for words. Really, can anybody hear me? Hello? I’m actually getting slightly uncomfortable, because I’m looking out at all of you, and I can’t even make out any individual audience members actually throwing roses. It’s like, from my perspective, they’re all just flying right at me, and that, combined with the spotlights, which are actually a lot hotter than I would have thought, I’m just getting glimpses of you, here and there, and I have to say all of this noise is pretty deafening, the whole experience very disorienting.