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The Money is Always Greener in Somebody Else's Register
Introduction
"Nobody twisted your arm to be here. You're here of your own volition. You like to think the weight of the world rests on your shoulders. Like this place would fall apart if Dante wasn't here. Jesus, you overcompensate for having what's basically a monkey's job. You push fucking buttons. Anybody can just waltz in here and do our jobs. You're so obsessed with making it seem so much more epic, so much more important than it really is. Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante! And badly, I might add! I work in a shitty video store, badly as well....We like to make ourselves seem so much more important than the people that come in here to buy a paper, or, God forbid, cigarettes. We look down on them as if we're so advanced. Well, if we're so fucking advanced, what are we doing working here!?"
- Clerks (Kevin Smith)
Work sucks.
It's not merely a t-shirt or button slogan, it's an unfortunate truth. And not a man, woman, or strapped-for-cash teenager has lived without ample opportunity to research and lament this fact.
It's largely the same annoyances repeated day after day, job after job; the customer who thinks they know more about your job than you do, or perhaps the manager whose job you clearly know more about than he does, not to mention any number of superfluous company policies that exist merely to hinder and vex. And for every pet peeve there exists a standard response; a depressed, half-conscious catchphrase that flimsily conceals the bubbling hatred we direct toward the source of our frustration. "I don't make the rules, ma'am, I just follow them." "I'm very sorry, sir, it won't happen again." "No, no one told me how this was supposed to be done." No matter the job, no matter the issue, it's never entirely clear whether it's worth what you're paid. Even when the answer is instinctively a resounding "no".
"That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency."
- The A & P (John Updike)
Excluding the brave few who are not afraid to burn a few bridges in search of a better living, why is it we're so willing to tolerate a job we hate? The inconvenient hours, the inadequate pay, and the constant nagging question of who's more incompetent, the customers or the coworkers - why stomach it?
"O God," he thought, "what a demanding job I've chosen! Day in, day out, on the road. The stresses of selling are much greater than the work going on at head office, and, in addition to that, I have to cope with the problems of traveling, the worries about train connections, irregular bad food, temporary and constantly changing human relationships, which never come from the heart. To hell with it all!"
- The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
Through your mid-teens to mid-twenties, it might be you're convinced you can't do better. Gaining steady employment is practically dependent on mediocrity. After all, if you're forced to divide your time between a dull curriculum and a job that supplies just enough money to pay for rent, tuition and books, leaving little else for groceries and car repairs (and the less-than-occasional splurge), qualifications seem something of a moot point. College jobs notoriously require little more of you than a polite pretext and the ability to work all ten fingers while calculating simple math...often with the use of said fingers.
And it drains you of your sanity and soul, little by little, every day you're there.
Why, then, is that funny?
Because you've heard it all before. After all, if it weren't for insane stories about past coworkers, what would you have to share with your new ones?
You may hate your boss, but you at least have like-minded coworkers to share that loathing with. You can swim an interminable stream of moronic customers, but there's relief to be found in the fact you're neither the first nor the last to do so. You can stumble and stutter through your first few weeks on the job, then months down the line a newest new guy arrives on the scene, and you have the pleasure of warning him of the horrors that await.
"It was my father's belief that nothing built character better than an after-school job. He himself had peddled newspapers and delivered groceries by bobsled, and look at him! My older sister, Lisa, and I decided that if hard work had forged his character, we wanted nothing to do with it. 'Thanks but no thanks,' we said."
- Dinah the Christmas Whore (David Sedaris)
The humor is in recognition, but also in distance. After all, no one enjoys getting screamed at by customers who mistakenly maintain they're always right, or by superiors who discover you've made an error and won't let you forget it. What makes it funny is either watching it happen to someone else (as is often the case with injury), or surviving such atrocity yourself and allowing time to reflect on and share the matter with a sympathetic listener. The humor of this anthology, I hope, is in how that recognizable grief is communicated to the sympathetic listener, in this case you. Some are in standard short-story format, and others I've chosen for their unique approach to both humor and illustration of steady employment's combined mundanity and absurdity.
"I'll babysit Trainee McUselessPants here if you pay me the overtime you owe me."
"Deal. But when I come back she better still be in one piece. No murdering her."
"Am I still allowed to murder customers? I do so enjoy the murderin'."
"Only if they're really annoying."
- Questionable Content (J. Jacques)
Beginning on the fictional end of the spectrum, I've included excerpts from two films likely to be found in any oppressed lower/middle class drone's collection, Kevin Smith's landmark independent feature Clerks and Mike Judge's lesser-known Office Space. The former centers on Dante, a New Jersey everyman forced to work the counter at a local convenience store on his day off - signaled by his repeated cries of "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" - flanked by his lazy, more than slightly demented best friend Randal. Clerks finds Dante stuck in a dreadful job in his mid-20s, unsure of what direction he wants his life to go in, and the supporting players, save for a sweet but neurotic girlfriend hounding him to go back to college, are of little to no help. Meanwhile Office Space's protagonist Peter, through a botched hypnosis session, snaps out of his work-induced glaze of depression and simply ceases to care what his employers think of him, and even schemes to make the job work for him rather than the opposite. Notable is the characters' shared defiance for their responsibilities (Dante, for example, closes the store at one point to play hockey on the roof and again to attend an acquaintance's funeral) that we all wish we could get away with more often.
"It isn't easy to feed the Insane Second Mate, since she plugged the soup chute full of sofa stuffing. We have cut a little hole in the door of the Crew Recreation Lounge, like a mail slot. We wait until the Insane Second Mate is asleep, because when she's awake, if she hears us at the door, she sticks her hands through and makes obscene gestures with the middle finger of her left hand, or throws pool balls at us."
- Intracom (Ursula K. Le Guin)
While John Updike's The A & P focuses much more on the mundane aspects of the workplace, it's included here as an example of an employee looking for any reason to quit the job he despises. Sammy's motivation is noble enough; the manager's treatment of three swimsuit-clad female customers demands a chivalrous act, but regrettably the deed goes unnoticed.
"'After twenty years of these two-hour battles I get the feeling there must be more to life, you know.' He turned, lifted up the front of his torn and bloodied gold-embroidered tunic and stared down at his own hairy tummy. 'Here, feel this,' he said. 'Do you think I'm putting it on a bit?'"
- The Secret Life of Genghis Khan (Douglas Adams)
Leading into the autobiographical section is David Sedaris' creative nonfiction piece Dinah the Christmas Whore, which takes place during the author's teenage years as a restaurant dishwasher. The workplace commentary is mostly in the first act of the story, but it's ample setup for the personal revelation he makes; like Clerks' Dante, David fools himself into thinking he's so much better than the job he has and deserving of much more, but through a bizarre, dangerous series of events realizes just how feeble and useless he really is.
First among the selections "based on a true story" is the account of "Roger Smith" (a web alias; for the sake of privacy his real name will not be used), an employee at an unnamed retail outlet, who chronicles his occasional consumer-related plights in his blog website, Tails From Hell (Retail) [http://anre.org/impudence], formerly titled Impudence of the Day. Written in a dear-diary format, the stories are quick and to the point, usually mingling the actual customer/cashier dialogue with asides from the narrator, perfectly conveying the all too stark contrast between what you can say and what you'd prefer saying.
Demonstrating that workplace troubles plague even the rich and famous - or at least the well-off and moderately renowned - the "famed" Bruce Campbell's autobiography If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor is dedicated to "the working stiffs of Hollywood, ninety-nine percent of whom are overlooked in those phony 'tell-all' books." Campbell's naturally acerbic, deadpan sense of humor gives the reading the mood of a 300-page stand-up routine. The included excerpts detail some of the various jobs, odd or otherwise, Bruce was forced to take in between movie roles (and various director-induced torture on the set of The Evil Dead and its sequels).
"Cab drivers, I learned, are invisible. Extremely personal conversations played out in the backseat, all within earshot of the nonentity behind the wheel. I particularly enjoyed listening in on the drunken ramblings of a man desperately trying to lure a woman into an affair. He was well on his way since our destination was a motel...Cab drivers are easy targets as well, because it's assumed that we are morons - why else would we be driving a cab? As a result, I declined many in-kind services of prostitutes headed home after a long night of tricks.
Hooker: Can I eat my fare, baby?
Bruce: Sorry, ma'am, I've gotta buy my own gasoline and, well, you know how prices are these days."
- If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor (Bruce Campbell)
Turning back to fictional tales, select episodes from Jeph Jacques's ongoing web-comic Questionable Content [http://www.questionablecontent.net] reveal the lightly sadistic and vindictive side of customer/employee relations. The comic strip format generally demands a setup and punchline in the space of three or four panels, and if an ongoing storyline is played out, as is the case with Questionable Content, the result is not unlike the laugh-a-minute format of a sitcom. And like a sitcom, a regular setting is introduced from which a majority of the hijinks ensue. While little is revealed regarding main character Marten's daily ritual of "office bitchery", the workplace humor is instead centered around the coffee shop "Coffee of Doom", operated by supporting characters Faye, Dora, and Raven, who get their laughs forcing customers to get their own coffee and charging gratuities to customers who use "bullshit faux-authentic" Starbucks terms like "venti" and "grande".
"Define your work. > Sell. Define how you accomplish this. > Talk.
Our brilliant new manager decides to play a live version of Phil Collins' 'In the Air Tonight', at blaring levels. He was not demonstrating for a customer, just displaying his authority.
Three customers complained, one walked out.
They wonder why we can't hit budget. I think I'll tell them at the next meeting in front of everyone."
- Tales From Hell (Retail) (Roger Smith)
Finally, from the fictional, we take a turn for the downright weird.
If only because I feel no humor anthology is complete without at least mention of Douglas Adams (once quoted, "I love deadlines; I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by."), the irreplaceable author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy graces this collection with his short story The Secret Life of Genghis Khan. Switching locales from the office to the battlefields of Asia, Adams spoofs the typically bloodthirsty barbarian image of the great conquerer by painting him a weary neurotic, who at one point bullies a peasant woman to question him about his day like a nagging housewife, then lengthily debates his hectic schedule for world domination. Hitchhiker's Guide fans take note; the story concludes with a surprise cameo by a side character from Life, The Universe, & Everything.
The collection concludes with Ursula K. Le Guin's Intracom, a science-fiction oddity that reads a bit like Alien as performed by Monty Python. The characters, who are referred to only by their rank and nicknames (Captain Cook, Mr. Balls, Bats, Bolts, and Sparks), refer to their surroundings as a spaceship; it is but a clever if thinly-veiled allegory for a human body, possibly as harried and overworked as its crew. Given the characters' casually frantic state, the story acts as a commentary on the ways in which we voluntarily abuse our bodies, and how survival of the workplace, wherever it is, depends largely on who's working beside you.
"Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately."
"Well, I wouldn't exactly say I've been missing it, Bob."
- Office Space (Mike Judge)
Purists will likely tell you that a job is a time for seriousness, where the wrong thing said or done can at any time get you fired, and where humor has no place.
Nuts to that, says I.
That said, I hope you enjoy this collection, and wish you every opportunity to have a giggle at the expense of someone who might just have it worse than you.
Also, look for the premiere of my webcomic A Theater Near You, detailing the real and imagined absurdities of my tenure at a local independent movie theater.
