by Dan Ryckert
It opened almost immediately.
“Abraham Lincoln here!” Brain said with a smile. “Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, Franklin Pierce!”
As I had estimated based on his graduation year, Brain looked to be in his early- to mid-50s. He was wearing light blue pajama pants, black socks, and no shirt. His gray hair was receding and he had some light stubble, but he didn’t look particularly disheveled. If he had been wearing a shirt, he wouldn’t have looked very odd at all.
“Brain!” Mike exclaimed. “What’s up, man?”
“Ready for a party! 3-4-1-2!”
He seemed thrilled to see us, and we were relieved that he appeared thoroughly unthreatening. I sent the go-ahead text to the rest of the group waiting outside. They headed in and joined us in Brain’s apartment.
It was hard to get any real read on Brain based on the look of his place. The Albert Einstein calendar on his wall was from 1972. Black-and-white portraits of families from the 1800s hung on the wall. A bundle of at least 15 lighters was held together with rubber bands. One corner of the apartment featured almost a dozen basketballs, many of them with names written on them in Sharpie (we assumed that he was stealing stray balls from his apartment complex’s basketball court). In the bathroom was a bottle of Pert shampoo that must have been at least thirty years old, based on the logo and accumulated grime.
It was a collection of odds and ends, but it certainly didn’t feel like some serial killer’s lair. The laboratory he bragged about didn’t exist and he was in a great mood. Once we were all inside, he offered everyone Kool-Aid. Even though Brain didn’t seem threatening, none of us were about to drink anything that he prepared.
We cracked open a few beers and found seats around his living room. Without any warning, Brain picked up a harmonica and began playing a manic tune that seemed to make sense only to him. He shuffled back and forth as horrible metallic squeals came from the instrument. We applauded and complimented him as if he were Bob Dylan.
Once the musical portion of the evening concluded, Brain floated between stories, jokes, and crazy claims about his professions. On top of being an FBI agent and a lightbulb installer, he was also a minister, a studio musician, a landscaper, and a Lawrence police officer. At one point, he leaned on his ministerial background to perform a wedding ceremony for Mike and his friend Carrie, who were in no way dating. Afterward, he explained the history of the internet to us. Did you know that the term “dot com” came about because all of us on earth are just part of one big commune? Also, on the Fourth of July, he prefers to make love instead of shooting off fireworks.
We spent about 90 minutes at Brain’s place that first night. I was happy that none of my friends seemed to be making fun of him at all. Sure, the fact that he had a few screws loose was what drove us there in the first place, but he genuinely seemed thrilled to have company to talk to. When we left, he gifted his Einstein calendar to one of my friends and a basketball to another.
For a couple of years, we’d give Brain a call every few months after leaving the bars. If he answered, he’d always invite us over to tell us stories and play harmonica. We veterans of the Brain trips would always try to recruit a friend or two to experience him for the first time. This continued until one day when the calls stopped going through. We never did find out what happened to him, and I look back on those visits as tremendously odd but sincerely enjoyable. It seemed to be a great time for him as well.
Visiting crazy people wasn’t a required part of my job at KUEA, as our actual jobs were supposed to follow a by-the-book protocol. We were assigned a calling pool at the beginning of each shift. Once we received our assignments, we were to flip to the appropriate school’s fact sheet in our binder for potential topics for conversation. It was easy to estimate how many donations you’d get each night based on the pool you were assigned. Business and engineering alumni were easy fodder for higher contributions, while social welfare and theater majors would frequently respond to donation requests with laughter.
Even when you were in the more coveted calling pools, you could tell within 30 seconds whether you’d be adding anything to your night’s donation tally. That’s why I hated the script we were supposed to follow. It was called the Ask Ladder, and it required every caller to start with a request for $1,000. This level was called the “Dean’s Club,” and we were supposed to move down to lower tiers—$500, $250, and $100—if the person refused.
Asking for donations wasn’t the part that bothered me. That’s what we had signed up for when we applied, after all. It was the fact that we were supposed to pester these alumni by going through the entire Ask Ladder (complete with different script points for each tier) even if they directly told us that they wouldn’t be donating this year. I hated that I was expected to plead at least three more times after an initial denial, putting them in the awkward position of considering hanging up on me. Plenty did, and I never blamed them.
I stuck to the script for the first month or two that I worked at KUEA. It never stopped bothering me. Eventually, I shortened the process and simply asked each person if there was a donation level they’d be comfortable contributing at. That led to shorter calls, and far fewer angry people.
Managers would occasionally monitor our calls to make sure we were sticking to the Ask Ladder, and I’d always get pulled into the office when they heard one of mine. No matter how much I tried to explain my reasoning, they weren’t having it. I was warned numerous times about my call style, and these warnings didn’t stop until about a year into my employment there.
That happened because most of the old managers left KUEA or got promoted to another department. Luckily, several of my good friends stepped into these management roles. One of these friends was Shawn. We had been hired at the same time, and usually sat next to each other during our shifts.
Shawn started out as a saxophone performance major, and then took a hard right after a couple of years and became a med student. He’s now a successful doctor in Kansas City. We worked together during my most egregious years of slacking off—both academically and professionally—and I was always amazed when I asked to see his weekly class schedule. While I was sleeping until 2 p.m. and going months without entering a classroom, he was running between wall-to-wall classes every day before starting his shifts at KUEA. His work ethic amazed me. My complete apathy toward school amazed him.
Even though he took academics super seriously, he had an appreciation for dumb humor. Whenever I saw him get up to use the bathroom, I’d take note of how long he was gone. If more than a minute and a half passed, I knew he’d be in the middle of taking a shit instead of peeing. As soon as I deduced that, I’d get up, walk into the bathroom, and turn off the lights, leaving him in total darkness. This was before everyone had cell phone flashlights to aid in situations such as these, so the idea of him having to shit (and somehow wipe) in the dark always made me laugh.
This was so funny to me that I started expanding it to pretty much every guy I worked with. If somebody was sitting on the pot at work, it was a surefire bet that I’d pop in and flip the switch. It never got old to me, and I probably did it hundreds of times.
On one occasion, I went in to use the urinal and noticed that somebody was in the stall. Despite not knowing who was in there, I did my usual thing by turning the lights off. I walked back into the call center and looked around to see who was missing from their desk. It surprised me to see that all 24 seats were occupied. All the managers were also present. Who could have been in the stall? Our shifts were in the evenings, and nobody else was supposed to be in the building except for us call center kids.
I sat back down and wondered whom I had left in the dark. Fifteen minutes later, the door leading to the bathroom hallway swung open violently. Standing there was a middle-aged man I only recognized from his picture on the wall. It was the head of the entire Endowment Association.
Standing next to him was a young boy who couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven. He was she
epishly looking at the floor.
“Who in here thought that it’d be a funny joke to turn the lights out on my son as he was in the bathroom?” the man boomed.
I immediately averted my eyes, sulked down, and pretended to be in the middle of a call. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Shawn struggling not to laugh. Several other people in the room were looking at me, the obvious culprit.
The man loudly asked several more times before realizing that he wasn’t getting anywhere with this group. He left with his son, the incident was never brought up again, and on the next day I resumed turning the lights off whenever anyone was pooping.
Once my friends ascended to managerial positions, I gave myself permission to really slack off at work. Simultaneously, I also raised more money than any caller in the history of the organization. This was largely thanks to my quick approach to calls. While others were following the script and bantering with alumni for the recommended eight minutes before asking for money, I got right down to it.
Our monitors displayed a record of what each alumnus had donated in the past, so I used that as a reference. If someone had given $250 every year since 1992, it was as easy as saying “Hi, this is Dan from the Kansas University Endowment Association. How are you? That’s great. I see that you’ve been a loyal donor to our programs for quite some time. Would you like to contribute again this year?”
They’d tell me to put them down for the same amount, and I’d thank them before moving on to the next call. If I saw that an alum had never once given us money, I’d “accidentally” hang up before the call started, and move on until I found a regular. My stats went way up, and upper management responded by putting me in the most lucrative calling pools as a result. These were often donors who gave thousands of dollars every year, and were more than happy to check that box again and get off the phone as soon as possible. Upper management loved my numbers and the student managers were my friends. They weren’t about to tell their bosses that I got those numbers by going as far off-script as possible. By the time I quit, I had raised several hundred thousand dollars for the university. To this day, I have a large collection of certificates that KUEA gave me whenever I broke another record.
My time at KUEA overlapped with my time reviewing video games for a local newspaper and website. I got cocky enough to try to do both at the same time. Since I actually gave a shit about my games writing, I wanted that to receive 100 percent of my attention while I was on the clock at KUEA. It would have been nearly impossible to do that while I was on the phone with alumni, so I came up with the perfect workaround.
At the time, the biggest portable console in the world was the Nintendo DS. Each week, I received a handful of games for the system. I was determined to review every game that came in, but there were only so many hours in a day (even considering that I was skipping virtually all of my classes). Writing reviews while I was on the clock at KUEA would be tricky to pull off. If I could find a way to do that, it would be much easier to get through all of the games I needed to cover.
My bosses didn’t have a problem with me playing games if I wasn’t actively on a call. Once an alumnus picked up, however, the DS had to be closed and out of my hands. This was enforced by a feature of the calling software at each station. If we were currently on a call, the background of the monitor would be bright green. If we were dialing, it would be yellow. If no activity was happening at all, it would be white.
Several student managers were present during each shift, and their primary role was to walk around the office and make sure that everyone’s screen was either green or yellow. A white screen wasn’t a big deal if someone was taking a quick break or going to the bathroom, but managers would eventually tell us to start dialing again.
Playing my DS games in tiny bursts between alumni picking up wasn’t ideal, so I devised a way to play constantly. I’d dial an alumnus at the beginning of my shift, making my screen turn yellow. Before they picked up, I’d hit the Print Screen button on my keyboard and then hang up the phone. From there, all I had to do was paste the yellow screengrab into MS Paint, fullscreen the image, and play DS games for the duration of my shift. I’d typically call a few of the gimme donors just to ensure that I raised some amount of money, but it was all games all the time outside of that.
I was able to ride this out for way longer than I expected. My manager friends knew about it and thought it was funny, so upper management never got wise to what was happening. Eventually, my slacking started to catch up with me. When it came time for employee reviews, upper management would monitor calls without us knowing about it.
Angela was my primary manager, and she was mortified when she monitored a few of my calls. She noticed my extremely brief back-and-forth with alumni. Over the last few months, she also got irked with the amount of screwing around I did at the office—after all, that bathroom trick never got old to me. After being called into her office on numerous occasions, I started wondering if I was on borrowed time at KUEA.
Things came to a head in an unexpected way after a party at Shawn’s house. Everyone had too much to drink, and Shawn passed out in the living room. Naturally, the Sharpies came out. People at the party took turns writing and drawing things on him, including me. My contribution was the phrase “SHAWN EATS POOP” on his back, next to a bad drawing of Shawn eating poop. I also drew a bunch of ejaculating penises on his calves.
It was another standard weekend night and everyone went home afterward to pass out. Shawn’s alarm went off early the next morning, and he scrambled to get to his second job at a Chipotle. Unfortunately, he noticed most of the penises on his legs and scrubbed them off during a quick shower. Fortunately, he missed one—and wore shorts to work.
Shawn filled bowls with chopped chicken for several hours before a coworker pointed out the erect penis on his calf. He informed me of this later that night during our KUEA shift, and it became the funniest thing in the world to me. A faint outline of a penis could still be seen after his hasty attempt at cleaning it in a Chipotle bathroom.
I spent the first hour of my shift playing my DS while occasionally chuckling to myself about that weiner on Shawn’s calf. Suddenly, he approached me with a look on his face that struck me as genuinely serious.
“Hey man,” he said. “Can you come into the office for a second?”
His tone was totally different from the “aw, ya got me!” tenor of our previous conversation. We both sat down in the manager’s office, and he let out a heavy sigh.
“So I’m probably not supposed to tell you this,” he began. “But I went to print something just now and saw this sitting in the tray. Angela’s not gonna be in until tomorrow, so I just thought I’d show you so you don’t get blindsided.”
Shawn handed me a piece of paper on KUEA letterhead, and my face sank as I read it. It was signed by Angela and addressed to her superiors, with the subject line RE: Termination of Student Development Associate Dan Ryckert.
It made mention of “several grievances that have been recorded and documented,” and went on to point out my general negative impact on the office:
We have repeatedly bent our expectations of student callers in order to save Mr. Ryckert’s position, largely due to his relationships with callers and student managers, but now I believe that we have reached the point with Dan where his continued employment would be a detriment to our program as his influence on callers and other students is beginning to create difficulty for our student managers and myself.
This all seemed fair to me. For quite some time, I had wondered how far I could push things before somebody finally came down on me. Apparently that time was now. It wasn’t until the next paragraph that I became confused. In it, Angela claimed that she had received a returned pledge card from an angry alumnus. He claimed that he had spoken to me on the phone and declined to pledge, but I had put him down for the money anyway.
Slacking off? Sure. Putting up a fake screen so that I could play video games during my shift? Absolutely
. But falsifying pledges? Even I wasn’t dumb enough to pull something like that. The first part of the letter made perfect sense to me, but I was baffled by the falsification accusation.
I expressed this to Shawn, and he produced Exhibit B. It was the returned pledge card. On it, the alumnus had written “I did not make this pledge. I told the young man that I would not give this year.”
Well, hell. I wasn’t sure how that had happened, but I knew that the hammer was finally about to come down. In the last paragraph of her letter, Angela explicitly called for me to be fired.
“I’m sorry, man,” Shawn said as he took the paper and pledge card back from me. “I just thought you should know.”
None of this was unexpected. KUEA was totally in the right to want to fire me, even aside from the “falsification” issue. I was surprised by how I felt upon hearing the news. It wasn’t anger at this justified decision; it was sadness over leaving this place where I had met so many friends. Those early years in the dorms helped me come out of my shell, but my social circle in later years of college consisted largely of my KUEA colleagues.
“Thanks, man,” I told Shawn. “I appreciate it. Let’s make sure that we all still hang out even though I won’t work here anymore. I’m really gonna miss all you guys.”
Shawn nodded and bit his lower lip, which I initially read as sadness. Considering how the rest of this panned out, I know now that he was holding back laughter.
I thanked him again and left the office, planning on leaving that day and never coming back to hear the official word from Angela. Between their calls, I walked up to my coworkers’ stations to say goodbye.
“So I just found out that I’m getting fired,” I said to Kyle, Theresa, Sam, Mike, Tori, Jeremy, and 17 other friends. No one was surprised, but most of them seemed sad to hear the news. Handshakes and hugs were exchanged, and then I’d move on to the next station.