Everything Is Awful

by Matt Bellassai

  7. No reclining on airplanes because it’s a dick move and it should never have been allowed in the first place. Honestly, the person behind you has like six inches of freedom in front of their face, and you’re just gonna jerk back your cowardly spine and deprive them of air to breathe all for an extra ten degrees of comfort!? You’re an asshole and so is everybody you love.

  8. Babies are to be kept on silent at all times, and if one goes off in public, it shall be discarded.

  9. Honking a car horn for longer than one second shall be considered a crime punishable by an unrelenting air horn directly to the eardrum until explosion.

  10. All microwaves shall heat Hot Pockets to the perfect temperature, whereby the saucy center is heated evenly with the crusty surface.

  11. Anybody who complains about not liking the Kardashians shall be banned from enjoying anything ever again. Sorry you didn’t get famous for no reason. Let people enjoy their fucking reality TV show.

  12. All squirrels are to be humanely euthanized and their meat is to be baked into pies given to disobedient children at Christmastime.

  13. Any man who wishes to wear a V-neck in public must obtain written permission from the president personally. Applications for V-neck privileges should include pictures of the applicant wearing the requested garment(s). Applicants without defined pectorals and/or abdominals need not apply.

  14. Every grocery store lane shall be a ten-items-or-less lane, because nobody needs more than ten groceries at once.

  15. People who say “I could care less” are to be banished to a remote island with people who say “irregardless.”

  16. Salad shall never be served as a meal.

  17. All boxes of cereal shall cost one dollar, because it absolutely cannot cost eight dollars to make a box of Froot Loops.

  18. Quinoa is banned because I don’t trust it.

  19. All professional sports must be performed in the nude, except NASCAR because I don’t give a shit about NASCAR.

  20. You know what, now that I think about it, let’s just ban NASCAR. No NASCAR or any cars that go faster than, like, fifty miles per hour.

  21. Listening to music out loud in public shall be a crime punishable by immediate flogging.

  22. Nobody with gross feet is allowed to wear open-toed shoes, in private or otherwise.

  23. Outside will be heated and air-conditioned.

  24. Anybody who utters the words “Can I speak to the manager?” will be locked inside a dimly lit room overlooked by a two-way mirror. Inside this room will be a desk with a locked drawer. Inside this drawer will be a gun. Inside this gun will be a single bullet. The offender will be given three clues to find a key hidden inside the room. The key will unlock the drawer. If successful, the offender will retrieve the gun and then be faced with a choice: either shoot themselves or fire at the two-way mirror, shattering the glass to find another room that may or may not lead them to safety. Unbeknownst to the offender, the second room will be occupied by a hungry mother grizzly bear recently separated from her newborn cub. If all goes well, the grizzly bear will rip the offender to shreds, whereupon the manager will enter to take the offender’s question.

  25. And finally: universal health care. I mean, c’mon. We can’t let Canada have something that we don’t.

  ON TERRIBLE FIRST JOBS

  It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I don’t like to work. They say, “Get a job doing what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” or some bullshit like that, but I like doing absolutely nothing, and nobody’s paying me to do that. Trust me, I’ve tried. If I could get paid for eating, I would do that, but at this point, people should be paying me to stop eating.

  I should clarify, it’s not because I’m lazy, or at least it’s not just because I’m lazy. I hate working because I’m actively bad at it.

  My first job was at a bank in the suburbs of Chicago, which you might think is an odd place for a sixteen-year-old to work, and I would agree, but my mother’s best friend worked there and I’ve never been above blatant nepotism. Working at a bank when you’re sixteen is just like in the movies where the boy next door works at some cute place like a Dairy Queen and gets cute dollops of ice cream on his nose while he’s dipping cones in melted chocolate, except instead of a Dairy Queen, it was the accounting department that my mom’s friend worked at, and instead of ice cream, it was blotches of charcoal toner from the malfunctioning office printer. Basically the same thing.

  It was an old bank, the same one that my mom worked at when she was my age but had to quit because she got knocked up with my brother and chose a life of motherhood instead of a fulfilling career in suburban banking. One of her best friends still oversaw the accounting department, and I politely hinted at a family party that I was finally old enough to legally wear a necktie in public and that perhaps I could use a job that might help pay for my budding necktie collection and that my passion, obviously, was to work in the accounting department of the local branch of my friendly neighborhood bank. Besides, when I was a kid, I used to go to my dad’s office and sit in the corner with one of those receipt machines and type numbers into it wildly as it spit out an ever-winding snake of paper containing my meaningless calculations. It made me feel important, because people with receipt machines are important, and it was possibly the only qualification I had to work at an actual financial institution. My mother’s friend said she would see what she could do, perhaps there were some menial tasks I could help with during the summer. The next day, I was officially an accounting associate.

  I wore a button-down dress shirt tucked into khakis and a necktie that my dad tied around my neck for my first day. My mom took a picture of me in the kitchen before I left that morning, and it looks like one of those pictures that terrorists take of people they’ve kidnapped, except sadder.

  When I walked into the bank, I was directed to the accounting department: down two flights of stairs, along a long, dark hallway, past the mail room, and beyond the flickering light.

  My boss was an oversized woman named Shirley, a professional working mom who wore brightly colored blazers with shoulder pads and gaudy jewelry, and screamed when she sneezed, like an actual scream that you scream when someone is stabbing you with a broken wine bottle. Shirley’s office, with a window covered in those corporate white blinds, overlooked the accounting department cubicles. From her throne, she could watch all of us labor beneath her.

  The cubicles were what you’d expect from a typical bank office: overhead fluorescent lighting, creaky black desk chairs in front of computers that only produced pale green text on black screens, and hideous carpeting to muffle all of our screams.

  Out in the open cubicles sat my coworkers, six middle-aged women—Linda, Patricia, Cynthia, Maxine, Deborah, and Janice—all of whom had worked in that very office for longer than I’d been alive, each crazier than the last, perhaps because they’d been trapped together in that very same basement since the bank was built above it forty years earlier.

  Shirley led me to my desk, or rather, led me to the desk I’d be sharing with Janice. I was to be, in essence, Janice’s protegé. Janice worked only part-time to begin with, and she was slated to leave for a month in the coming weeks, so my job was to learn her tasks so I could perform them while she was away.

  It took thirty minutes to discover just how special Janice truly was. She was a small, paper-thin woman, the kind who might blow away in a particularly weak breeze or fall over after a gentle cough. Her eyes looked like they were always asking for your permission, and you just had to be like, “Janice, stop being weird and show me how the copy machine works.” She was constantly crumbling with stress. Every minor problem was a cause for major concern. If we ran out of paper clips, it was a category-five shit storm, and Janice was seconds away from bursting into flames.

  We sat side by side at her desk, in front of her whirring computer, and she walked me through her day. First, we looked at all the business checks that needed to b
e signed by two people and made sure they were actually signed by two people in case a local pizza shop co-owner decided to stage a silent coup in the dead of night and stealthily withdraw all the pizza money from the account he shared with his wife.

  As we were flicking through the checks, she stopped me and asked, “Do you have kids?”

  My sixteen-year-old self found this question surprising. Yes, in her defense, I was wearing a shirt and tie, which might normally make a person look more mature, but not in my case. Putting a shirt and tie on me was a lot like putting a shirt and tie on a baby, which is to say it made the outside observer even more painfully aware of the fact that what they were looking at was a literal baby in a shirt and tie.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sixteen.”

  “Oh,” Janice said. “Well. My daughter just turned eighteen and she’s having her second baby.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah,” Janice said. “And it’s with a different guy this time.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s . . . nice, I guess.”

  I should point out that I have absolutely no judgment of Janice’s daughter. I mean, hell, she’d gotten two more guys to knock her up than I ever had. Good for her. I hope by now she’s had ten other babies with ten other guys and every Christmas she takes a picture with all the kids on Santa’s lap and then she mails the picture to all twelve of her babies’ daddies with a note that says, “Once you pop, the fun don’t stop.” It would be adorable, and I’d be happy for her.

  Still, though, how is a sixteen-year-old virgin supposed to respond to that information? Especially when it’s being provided by a woman I’d met literal seconds before this. But this was my first job, and I wasn’t really sure how people were supposed to behave in an office environment. Maybe teen pregnancy was just what grown-ups talked about when they worked.

  As the days wore on, it became painfully obvious that I had no idea what I was doing. I was a child playing office with a receipt machine. When it came time for my twenty-minute lunch break, I’d stand outside Shirley’s office and wait for her to get off the phone, like a kid waiting for his mom to get out of the bathroom, just so I could ask her for permission to walk down the hallway to the break room and eat the snack I’d brought from home. I thought I wasn’t allowed to leave the room without her express permission. Some days, I’d spend longer than twenty minutes just waiting to get her attention.

  To give you a full picture of just how bad I was at this job, and how ridiculous it was to let a sixteen-year-old boy be in charge of money that didn’t come with a board game, I fucked up one particularly important task.

  One of my jobs was to process something called fraud reports. To this day, I don’t entirely understand what those fraud reports were, but they sounded important. Fraud is a bad word in general, and it’s a particularly bad word at a bank where, ya know, people keep their money and jewels. A fraud report, I assume, was something that required a great deal of care. From what I remember, it was a rundown of all sorts of flagged activity, like unusual withdrawals or transfers or weird signatures, like when your credit card company calls you and asks if it’s really you that’s been spending one hundred and fifty dollars a day at the dildo emporium in Queens, and you have to explain that yes, it’s perfectly acceptable for a grown man to visit the dildo emporium at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday, as you’ve explained before, so please stop calling this number because the emporium charges are going to continue.

  I worked at the central branch of the bank, and my fraud report task was to break down each day’s accounts by branch and fax out a copy of the relevant information to the corresponding locations. Essentially, a little message to say, “Hey, one of your clients is maybe getting robbed, so be on the lookout for that.” Each day, I would make a small pile for each branch—I was nothing if not an organized gay—and, one by one, carry the stacks to the fax machine, because yes, we used fax machines, this was the 2000s and fax machines were the height of telecommunications technology, and I’d send each stack on its merry little way.

  For the children who may be unfamiliar, a fax machine was the monstrous bastard child of a phone, a printer, a scanner, a calculator, and the devil, and to wield power over it, one had to smear the blood of one’s firstborn son at the machine’s feet, so as to appease the beast within. I believe, to this day, that no person on earth has ever truly learned all the secrets of a fax machine. Really, you just push a bunch of buttons in rapid succession, and then jam your thumb onto a giant green switch, and pray to God that whatever you’re trying to send happens to make its way to the other side. It’s about 5 percent technology, 95 percent voodoo magic.

  I, however, prided myself on my fax machine mastery. Not to be crude, but I made that fax machine my bitch. I owned that shit. Every day, I walked over to that machine, and typed each number like I was slicing open the sternum of a dying patient so I could imbue her with a new beating heart that I’d grown myself from a petri dish. The machine was my instrument, and faxing was my beautiful music.

  I was so confident in my work that, after every session, I would take each branch’s stack of fraud reports to the shredder and dump them in, the crunching of the paper acting as my final confirmation of mastery over my domain.

  It wasn’t until one day some weeks into my accounting career that I noticed, as I was confidently strumming numbers into the fax machine’s dial pad, that a tiny symbol on the document feeder showed a little piece of paper whose corner was folded to show lines of text on the opposite side—a symbol, in other words, to suggest that documents were to be inserted text side down. I had not been inserting my documents text side down. I had been inserting my documents text side up, which meant that each day, when I’d delicately organized my fraud report piles, carried them one by one to the fax machine, placed them finely into the document feeder, effortlessly typed the numbers into the dial pad, and listened seductively as the music of each digit’s tone rang in my ear and the machine buzzed to life, slurping up my papers and spitting them out, emitting a final climactic beep to indicate the transaction was complete, throughout all this time, I’d been faxing the blank side of the paper out into the world and then shredding the originals. Every day, measly accounting associates in local bank branches around the greater Chicagoland area were wondering why in the hell their fax machines were buzzing awake in the middle of the day to spit out blank stacks of paper, and also why they hadn’t been receiving any fresh fraud reports lately and if perhaps we’d simply eradicated fraud altogether but somehow inherited a fax machine virus. I’d been sowing silent chaos for weeks, and I had no idea.

  Because I was never entirely sure how important those fraud reports were, I don’t know how much damage I caused by allowing some six weeks of fraud to go uninvestigated, but I should point out for posterity that the bank in question is no longer in business, and I can’t say that I am solely or even partially responsible for that fact, but I also can’t say that I’m not.

  For the sake of owning up to my faults and placing responsibility where it belongs, I’d like to say that I absolutely and completely blame Janice for this mistake. It’s obviously possible that she showed me how to use the fax machine correctly on day one, but let’s be real, she probably didn’t. And for that, Janice can never be forgiven. Obviously she should’ve taken greater care to show a young, helpless child like myself that you have to place your stack of precious documents in the fax machine one way or they may never be seen by a person in the world ever again.

  And while we’re accepting blame, I’d also like to blame literally every other person in that office for being such a distraction. Maybe I would’ve faxed those documents correctly had it not been for Cynthia, who got up every ten minutes to smoke a cigarette and on more than one occasion, if my nose was right, drink from a flask of vodka she kept in her blazer pocket. Or for Patricia, who spoke rapid, angry Spanish into her desk phone for hours on end. Or for Deborah, who went to the mov
ie theater with her boyfriend every Friday to see literally every movie released that week, only to come in on Monday and recount each plot in its entirety with absolutely no regard for spoilers. Or, worst of all, were it not for Janice and her aura of darkness.

  I don’t want to discredit the obvious stress she was under as a working woman responsible for two grandchildren, but as my days as a full-blown accounting associate continued, so did Janice’s days as the epitome of melancholia.

  On one afternoon, the girls and I were talking about vacations we’d been on, presumably to try visualizing some form of escape from the hell we were then laboring under. Maxine had recently been to Denver with her new husband. I was getting ready to go to Michigan with my family. Deborah couldn’t take vacations because she’d miss that week’s newest movies and it would throw off her whole schedule. It was a lovely conversation.

  And then, out of nowhere, Janice says, “Well, we like to go camping. But the last time we went, our dog committed suicide.”

  There was silence before someone said, “Wait. What?”

  Yes, Janice explained, they’d been camping recently and had set up one of those elevated tents, the kind that ties to a few different tree trunks and hangs a couple feet above the ground to make the tent less accessible to bears or other woodland menaces, and when they stepped away, their dog managed to nuzzle the tent flap open and jump out. But he was still wearing his leash and he never made it to the ground.

  Now, if your mouth is hanging open, you are not alone. We all sat in silence trying to process what she’d just said, entirely unprompted. Classic Janice.

  “Jesus, Janice!” I said. “That’s awful.” Because that’s the only thing you can say to that kind of thing. Even though what you really wanna say is, “I don’t blame him. I would’ve done the same.”

  That conversation trailed off into nothing.