In case you haven’t heard, of late I’ve kind of become a big deal. Is it because I did something require skill, precision or intelligence? No. It’s because I got hired as a stock boy at Banana Republic. One of the funniest things I’ve witnessed is telling people about my new position. It kind of goes like this:
“Hey, Tedd, you seem cooler than usual…what’s up?”
“Well…I do have a new job.”
“Employment is so awesome!”
“True!”
“Where you working?”
“A little boutique called: Banana. Republic.”
“Wow, you must be attractive.”
For some reason everyone thinks that you have to be attractive to work at The Banana. This is technically true if you are a salesperson at the Banana. The people who sell on the floor are hot tamales. I am not a salesperson. I work behind a giant beige curtain and bring clothes to the floor only when necessary. The managers like to keep me as far away from human eyes as possible. Being as I’m hideous and still have little experience, a lot of nights I am also put on the “POWER Close Team!”
Is it a special group of retail superheroes who fly into stores at night and magically transform the store from Flubby to Fab!? …Kind of. What we are is a group of grad and college students who roll in from 7-12 and do mindless tasks to make the story look Fab! And yes, the absence of magic or superpowers makes this job tedious and lame. Highlights of the past few weeks include getting to stack T-shirts and align the stickers so that they are all perfectly straight! If that’s not impressive enough for you, I also got to stack ten whole stacks of Argyle sweaters – this task took me almost two hours as all the sweaters had to be put in size order and board folded so that they looked perfect for that one customer who comes in at 11 am right when we open and actually cares. All others are treated to the grizzled stacks that are created when one guy needs a medium sweater and so destroys the entire 30 minutes worth of effort in one feel swoop.
But what about your other job, Tedd?
Oh, right. Yeah so my job calling people has gotten better – mostly because I do it less. I figured out early into my stint at the company that there was not enough work for me to be working there. I was promised 40 hour work weeks and overtime and basically got 20 hours of work and 20 hours of boredom.
This job has been kind of a rollercoaster because I have never really had any idea what I’m doing. My training was basically twenty minutes and then my supervisor gave me a phone and was like, “Call people and make them come in.”
So I kind of did it for a while and then all of a sudden I got these threatening emails from the big boss who said I wasn’t working hard enough. I learned that this was largely because no one told me I had to mark all the calls I made, so it looked like I was making 10 calls a day instead of the 60 or 70 that was actually happening.
Never fear, however; I got an email from my boss the other day, which basically read something like this:
Tedd,
You had 70 calls yesterday and 11 appointments. The day before you had 68 calls and 10 appointments. I think you think you could be doing great better than what you are doing now which is good to be doing better than you were doing which was okay but now its good so keep bettering your good you almost did before.
…
So I got that email and had no idea whether it was good or bad. At the end of the day my boss came up to me and was like, “Tedd…did you get my email.” I kind of gave this intermediary look of pain/smiling. There was a moment hesitation before I heard: “Great job!” So evidently…I’m doing okay…which is good better than what was okay before good bettering because good.
In addition to my two glamorous jobs, I’m also rocking it out in Grad Skool!! Unfortunately my classes aren’t as full of creepy art school kids as I had originally hoped. I’m still crossing my fingers that someone will write a creepy story about death or weirdness in my fiction workshop, but so far it doesn’t look too promising. The last two stories were a philosophical tract about the loss of Christianity in modern society and a melodrama about a family building a house and dealing with autism. They were both good. I’m kind of worried about the reactions I’ll get to my story about an accountant who writes a play about a Roman slaying his wife and brother which is funded by the heir to a dog food fortune will be received… I hope they get my sense of humor.
The one amazing moment so far was during my other class which is taught by a 6’6” Bosnian bald man. The course title? Violence, War and Suffering… So anyhoo, the first day of class we were going through the first page of the book. I haven’t done a close reading of literature since ’06, so this was new territory again for me.
The first sentence is something like: “The soldiers marched across the field toward the smoke.”
And my prof was like “What does it mean?”
I can’t even believe what came out of this discussion…:
“The soldiers represent Jesus rising up out of hell and smoke.”
“It’s written in a straightforward manner mimicking the journalistic style of Nakovsky another famous Russian novelist of the time.”
“I think it’s a passage about the ultimate end of the novel and the main characters redemption through the burning of the Polish town.”
…What? Really? I think it’s about marching…and soldiers. So basically I was sitting there with my head spinning and everyone was chattering about how the line was an actual reference to the Talmud and the coming Messiah.
Suddenly this one girl made a claim about how it was actually an homage to some French painter’s portrait of the Crimean War, and this one lady just goes:
“No. I don’t think so.”
I almost laughed out loud at this point. You can’t do that! Everyone knows literature classes are expensive book clubs that bear fruit in the form of a piece of lamb skin parchment that says, “Yes, Tedd Hawks did spend 60 hours at a University studying literature with the fact in mind that it served no practical purpose. Thanks for the 25,000 dollars XOXO Northwestern University.” But to have someone just Witch Slap someone else’s interpretation is one of the funniest things I’ve ever experience. That’s like coming out of a movie theater and having someone say, “Yeah, that was good.” And someone saying, “No. You’re wrong.”
Luckily, since that incident, the woman who made the “No” statement has become my BFF. We sit next to each other and she makes Tourette’s-ish statements to us, her seat neighbors. I laughed really hard when she was staring at the dungy carpet squares in my classroom and was like, “Really? Who looks at those carpet squares and says, ‘Yes! That’s what I want.’” I tried to make a funny, witty comment back to her like, “Yeah…those squares are ugly.” But she just looked at me and said, “No.”
It’s also worth noting that in this class we have to turn in papers every week. Basically these papers involve paying as much attention to possible to one aspect of the book we are reading, i.e. the use of adjectives, adverbs or prepositions; how the ending or beginning works in the book; etc. So I get my paper the first week and my teacher writes on it, “Good job, Matt.” I thought it was funny the first time – like, how do you not look at the name on a paper before making a comment about it?
So I laughed it off until I got my paper back the next week and again on the bottom is written: “Interesting stuff, Matt.” What? I don’t even know what’s going on with that. My only hope is that Matt is much smarter than me and I will get his good grade at the end of the semester. But, I’m dying to get my work back this week and see what’s on it. If he writes, “This one sucks balls, Matt” on it, I’m actually going to go up to him and be like, “Listen tall bald guy, I realize you got a genius grant and your write really good stuff and you’re a big deal or whatevs (I will say whatevs), but my name isn’t Matt. And you don’t even have to remember it in class, you just have to look at the top of the page where it says, ‘Tedd’ and not ‘Matt’ and adjust your comments accordingly. Then I’ll turn to my seat neighbor and nod my head. And she, of course, will just say, “No.”
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