But that was hardly the height of Janice’s melodrama.
There was a handful of weeks where Janice left on grand-maternity leave, and I took over her tasks full-time. It was a perfectly fine month, despite the fraud report mess (which, by the way, nobody ever noticed, and you know I kept that shit to myself). I was free to wreak havoc entirely on my own. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I did have access to everybody’s account information—again, no bank should have given a sixteen-year-old this level of clearance—and yes, I did look up all of my friends’ bank accounts. For business.
When Janice finally returned, rather than having her resume the duties she’d been responsible for forever and that I had surreptitiously taken over, Shirley relegated her to a series of menial secretarial tasks that needed dedicated work. Now, far be it from me to point out that it should’ve been the sixteen-year-old pipsqueak who got demoted to bitch work, and not the desolate woman who had worked there for years, but it was Shirley’s decree, and she was bigger and louder than all of us, so we did what she said. It also didn’t help that it was painfully obvious that I’d only gotten this job because my mother’s friend ran the whole place, that I was only a pimply interloper who had come into Janice’s space and declared it my own. But I do as I’m told.
Here was Janice’s task. Sometimes, people get sued. Sometimes they get sued because of money stuff. It’s very complicated, and I would explain it to you, but honestly you wouldn’t understand. Just trust me on this. Sometimes, when people get sued because of money stuff, they have to produce a bunch of documents, like bank statements and cashed checks and pictures of receipts from the dildo emporium, and it’s up to the bank to print all that shit out, except maybe the dildo receipts, but all the rest of it for sure. And this particular summer, there was a case that required every document from one account for basically the past thirty years. Which sounds like a perfectly easy task until you remember that Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet until 1996, and almost all of those documents weren’t on a computer. Instead, images of all of those checks were on tiny rolls of Kodak film that had to be inserted into a tiny machine and scrolled through individually, like a giant version of one of those ghastly red View-Master toys from the 1970s that you held up to your face and clicked through to see pictures of Bambi’s mom getting shot.
The Kodak machine was kept in a dank, windowless closet in a corner of the basement, and whoever was on printing duty (Janice, God bless her feeble soul) had to sit in a tiny chair in front of the film machine and individually turn through and print thousands of checks, one at a time, hour by hour, for days on end. In retrospect, I’m convinced that the film machine was not actually designed by Kodak for printing images, but created as some type of governmental experiment on mind control and torture, devised to reduce its users to their basest forms. By intention, I think, they designed the machine to run out of toner after every twenty-five pages, and you’d have to turn the whole damn thing around, take out its toner feed bag, shake it like you were seasoning a chicken breast, and put it back in the machine in the hopes that your shakes had reinvigorated its will to cooperate. But of course, each time you retrieved the toner bag, the machine would cough out a plume of thick black smoke that would settle on your hands and face and pants and lungs, because the room was the size of a closed oven and there was nowhere you could move to escape the inky cloud. You would emerge from printing duty like a coal miner returning from the shaft. It was the office equivalent of solitary confinement.
It took approximately three days for Janice to break entirely. Before noon on the third day, the machine had already jammed ten times, she’d shaken the toner bag a dozen times more, and smashed the machine to within an inch of its life, and finally, she came stumbling from the room wailing in distress, absolutely covered in charcoal toner dust, her sobs creating clear streaks of tears through the black soot on her cheeks, her hair a nest of ink and blood and tears, her body a shriveled shell of its already shriveled former self, stained, soiled, and defeated.
We all surrounded her like a dog that had just been rescued from a well, patting her on the back and offering her water and food from our hands. Of course, there was nothing else I could do. I volunteered to take Janice’s place, but Shirley was sending her home to recuperate, and the regular work needed to be done.
The next day, Janice returned and Shirley relegated her to some other menial task in a different closet with a different machine folding papers that needed to be stuffed into envelopes, and it took an hour before Janice came sobbing around the corner yet again, and Shirley had to be like, “Goddammit, Janice, get your shit together,” and she got sent home another time and we all kind of silently bowed our heads.
The rest of that summer didn’t get much better. You may be wondering what happened to Janice, and the truth is, I have no idea. I think her only relief was that I eventually went back to school and quit working. I can only assume she died halfway through Deborah’s retelling of Avatar, but nobody can be sure.
But there are three lessons I’d like to point out from this summer as an accounting associate. First, having an office job is basically like working in a coal mine, so we need to stop acting like those are two completely different things, because my lungs are still covered in toner (yes, I had to finish the job that Janice couldn’t). Two, we cannot send our nation’s Janices to the inevitable war against the robots, because we will fail. And three, never trust a child with your community’s finances unless you want an entire banking institution to crumble. You’ve been warned.
• • •
Of course, I’d like to think that working at that bank prepared me for life aboveground, but I left that office less equipped for the world than before.
The next summer, I got a job as a cashier at a department store, and I won’t tell you what department store that was, but I will tell you that this particular department store has way too many fucking coupons. And coupons are a scam, unless you’re one of those people on one of those extreme couponing shows, which doesn’t prove anything except that some people in Middle America have too much time on their hands and also too much room in their houses for five hundred excess packages of paper towels.
Here’s the thing that you learn almost immediately when you work in retail: the customer is absolutely never right. When you get a job at this particular department store, they make you watch an orientation video in a little room behind one of those doors that says “Employees Only,” and the video that tells you things like “don’t sexually harass your coworker Brenda” and also “the customer is always right,” except the problem is, only one of those things is actually true. It’s actually dangerous to be teaching these two things together when one of them is so obviously a lie, because it casts doubt on the whole damn production. We’d all be better off if the presentation just said, “Listen. Don’t sexually harass Brenda and also, the guy who wants 15 percent off that kitchen mixer he found in the sale bin can go fuck himself because it was never in the sale bin and he knows it.”
Retail workers experience the worst of America every single day, and most of the time, we don’t even let them sit while they do it. You just have to stand there behind a cash register for hours while people yell at you, because that’s what retail is: getting yelled at. You’d think, perhaps, that as a working professional I’d have been better at dealing with people, but considering the only other job I’d had was spent working in an office underground, my people skills were generally lacking, and yes, I got yelled at a whole bunch.
There was a man who yelled at me because I refused to accept a one-hundred-dollar bill so he could take a shirt that he hadn’t yet purchased out to his car and compare it to a pair of pants he’d bought somewhere else, which theoretically makes sense, since the shirt was probably worth only six dollars to begin with, but still! You can’t just go around letting people leave the store with stuff they didn’t pay for! I kindly explained that he could purchase the shirt and return it if it didn’t work out, but
he definitely couldn’t just walk out of the store with it, so he bought it and brought it back to return it and then I was like, “Sir, you have to take this to customer service because I can’t process your return here,” and then he turned the kind of red that you only see on chickens’ dangly things and he started cursing at me, and honestly, I probably would’ve cursed at me, too, but those are the rules.
There was a guy who tried purchasing a candle that someone had left on the shelf from another store (because it was truly an ugly candle and, I assume, they happened to come to their senses and abandon it then and there). I tried to explain that there was no way I could sell this man the candle because it wasn’t ours to sell (honestly, he could’ve just taken it), but he insisted on paying for it and refused to leave until I could tell him the price.
There was a woman who asked me where the exercise equipment was, and I pointed her to the opposite corner of the store, only for her to return twenty minutes later to scream that she’d said “exercise clothes,” which happened to be directly behind where I was standing all along.
There was a group of teenagers who tried to buy a pair of pants with a bunch of jewelry stuffed in the pockets, and when I pulled it out, they yelled at me for trying to accuse them of youthful thievery.
There was a woman who yelled at me because I refused to accept her coupon because it had expired, and normally we were supposed to accept expired coupons, but her coupon had expired eight years earlier and there are literally new coupons every week. I mean, c’mon. Put in some basic effort, lady.
And finally there was the woman who accused me of trying to ruin her credit score by asking her to sign up for a store credit card, even though all I was doing was trying to save her 15 percent.
But here’s where I need to pause and say, sometimes, the customer has a point. I’m not saying they’re right. I’m just saying, sometimes they have a point.
I hate when cashiers ask me to sign up for a store credit card. Sure, you save 15 percent now, but then you miss one payment and they charge you a bajillion dollars in interest fees and I already recklessly spend enough money without my money costing me even more money, so I’d rather we just avoid that whole mess and I pay with normal money like Jesus intended when he invented department stores in the first place. But of course “no” is never an acceptable answer when 15 percent off your entire purchase is at stake, and there’s an inevitable back-and-forth that always ends with the cashier casting judgment on you for refusing their kind and charitable attempt to save you seven dollars off a pair of pants that you’ll only wear for a month.
Having been on the other side of that transaction, though, I can say that it’s not any better for the cashier either, especially if you’re as terrible at salesmanship as I am. After all, I was hired as a cashier, not a salesperson. My job was to swipe your poor fashion choices over a laser inside a countertop and then tell you how much money you were shitting away. Nothing in my job description called for trying to trick people who shouldn’t have credit cards into signing up for a fucking credit card. Trying to sell people credit cards felt dirty. The first trick: when a customer is ready to check out, ask them, “Will this be going on your store card today?” If they say yes, great, we’ve already got ’em. If they say no, then you’ve got yourself a brand-new target. Congratulations, you’re halfway to being a sleazy credit-card salesman.
Of course, as dirty as it is, there’s a little thing called incentives, and in this case, every time I got someone to fill out an application (“It only takes two minutes! I just need your social security number, a driver’s license, and a urine sample, but the bathroom is right there!”), I’d get two whole dollars. And sure, it seemed like a lot of begging for only two dollars, but when you make eight dollars an hour, an extra two dollars every hour is nothing to piss at. Plus, every time you scored an application, you got to pick up the store intercom phone and announce “Code 4-7,” which was a signal to all the other store employees that you’d gotten a credit card application and were therefore better than them. Besides, you were helping the less fortunate by saving them 15 percent off their entire purchase!
But mixing together competition, credit scores, and adolescent stupidity isn’t the greatest idea in the world. Before long, I got into a daily “Code 4-7” battle with Rose, the jewelry counter cashier who nabbed a few applicants every hour. I couldn’t lose to an old woman hawking 15 percent off tawdry bracelets under the jewelry-counter lights.
The most common refrain from customers was “I don’t think I’d get approved,” which is a perfectly normal and responsible thing to say. If you know your credit score is bad, trying to sign up for a new credit card is probably not the greatest idea. But I found out that we could still give customers the 15 percent discount even if their application wasn’t approved. Which seems like a terrible business decision, but I didn’t question it. After I found that out, I’d start telling customers, “Look. It doesn’t hurt to fill out an application. Even if you don’t get approved, you’ll still get 15 percent off!”
In my defense, I was seventeen, I had never had a credit card, and I didn’t know what the fuck a credit score actually was. To be perfectly honest, I’m still not even sure what a credit score is, and I have no idea what makes it go up or down, besides making monthly sacrifices at the tomb of J. P. Morgan. So seventeen-year-old me, in those tight khakis and that ill-fitting black polo shirt, had no clue I was doing a bad thing, that I was exploiting the terrible financial choices of unsuspecting consumers. I just wanted two extra dollars and the satisfaction of hearing my voice reverberate throughout the store over Jewelry Counter Rose’s cries.
It was all fun and games until one day, when Rose was on a particularly successful streak, I got desperate and pressed a woman who I should’ve known was a clear and obvious “no” if she was absolutely sure she didn’t want to save 15 percent off her gorgeous selection of capri pants and crop tops (“Even if you don’t qualify, you’ll still get the discount off these amazing looks!”) and she snapped and launched into a long (and not at all unwarranted) tirade on why corporations were ruining the middle class, and at some point in her screams, I’m pretty sure she predicted the 2008 financial crisis, but I wasn’t entirely sure because I was crying at the time.
After that incident—and a not-so-gentle reminder from my boss that the point of offering discounts was to try to get approved applications so we could screw people for months and not just one day—I eased off my grind and allowed Rose to take it away. I figured I’d let her have this. Cosmically speaking, letting Rose get ahead was my way of making up for Janice. Even though that clearly wasn’t the case.
• • •
My third and final job as a struggling adolescent (before I graduated college and became a struggling adult) was a desk job at the law school of my undergraduate alma mater. I thought, for a few terrifying months, that perhaps I’d graduate and go to law school. Nothing in my professional history suggested this was a good idea, but I was an asshole and I liked money, so I figured I might be able to give it a shot. Working at a law school would put me right where the action was.
I got an interview and wore my finest shirt and tie, tucked into my finest khakis. It was June, the beginning of the height of summer in Chicago, and ninety degrees outside. I was living at home in the suburbs that summer, and the law school was downtown, right down the street from the famous Chicago water tower, but a full train ride and bus ride away from where I was.
I was not used to taking trains, especially not commuter trains. The only train I’d ever really taken was the train at the zoo that takes you around to all the different animals so you don’t have to walk. Commuter trains are way too intense, mostly because the same people ride them every single morning. That’s the suburban routine, a manifestation of the American dream. You live in a nice family house in the suburbs, and every morning, you kiss your children goodbye, pour a nice big travel mug of coffee, get on a train, and ride it to your fancy office
in the city. It’s literally the same people you’re traveling with every morning. They all stand in the same spot on the train platform so they can hop on the same car and get to the same seat, where they read the same newspaper over and over every day until they die. It’s terrifying to witness. One morning that summer, on my birthday no less, my mom called me from home to wish me a happy birthday because she’d been asleep when I left. She barely made it to the second stanza before the woman behind me violently tapped me on the shoulder to scold me for taking a phone call on the “quiet car.” I was quiet car shamed! On my own birthday! Commuter trains are intense.
Of course, the day of my interview was my first day taking the train. I waited on the platform with my messenger bag around my shoulder and across my chest like a true budding cosmopolitan professional. I was already nervous. There was a lot going on at the train platform. A man with a clipboard was going around asking for signatures to support his candidacy for neighborhood council, and I had to tell him no three times before he’d leave me alone. It was all very overstimulating. As the train came into view, though, I started to panic. What if I was on the wrong side of the tracks? What if I got on this train and it took me in the wrong direction? Before I had a chance to ask any of my fellow passengers, the train had arrived, the doors were opening, a conductor was yelling “all aboard,” and I was freaking out. So I stepped onto the train, one foot still on the platform, and tried asking the first person I could find if this was heading into Chicago, but she hesitated, and so did I, and the door started closing while I was still partially on the platform. I managed to get my second foot into the train before the door shut entirely, but my messenger bag, that holy symbol of young budding professionalism, got caught by the doors and trapped outside of the train, still wrapped around my torso, pinning me to the inside of the door with the strap tight against my chest like a car seat belt when you slam on the brakes. It was just slack enough for me to wriggle myself out of it, but the bag was still trapped outside of the doors, dangling out there like a loose button. I tried desperately to pry the doors open, but either I was too weak or they were too strong, because they didn’t budge. There was an emergency brake, but I’m terrible at deciding what amounts to an emergency, most of all when I’m in the middle of an emergency, and I didn’t pull it. I could do nothing but bang on the doors in exasperation and hope there’d be no tight tunnels between this station and the next.
Everything Is Awful Page 11