Another dispatch from the long-absent Ted the Henchman©:

So I had an absolutely shit day. Yes, it's Christmas at a retail store, but beyond that, I had to open the store today, and my manager left early because he's overworked and has the flu. Which left two of us in the store, neither one fully trained. The other guy, Jerald*, who is a nice enough kid, but a greedy competitive bastard when the cards are down.

Anyway, the manager went home after a few hours because he was just too sick, which was fine, and that left Jerald and I. Normally this would be no problem, but we got absolutely swamped. I mean nailed. And it wasn't just ringing up sales. We had tons of returns, phone calls, and worst of all, cell phone sales, which ties up the computers for at least fifteen minutes at a time, meaning the lines just get longer and longer and there's nothing you can do but wait. And it's cell phones that make the company the real money, not to mention the ones they pay you small cash bonuses for. But as I mentioned, Jerald is a greedy little bastard. A few days back, I actually saw him take a customer out of line, bumping a little old man with a one dollar item who was standing right there at the counter out of the way, so he could ring up a $50 sale. I wanted to slap him, but I resisted.

So without the manager there, or indeed anyone else to relieve the flow of impatient customers a bit, Jerald was able to cherry-pick the customers he wanted. So he got something like seven cell phone sales while I tried desperately to fix the sales of a few unsatisfied customers and ring up whatever strays I could. Meaning he made a small (okay, very small) fortune in commissions, while I made barely anything and got the stink eye from everyone.

By the time the tide of customers abated, it was 4:00, I'd been there since 9 AM without a break. I actually managed to sell one cell phone, but only by specifically telling Jerald that I had spoken to the customer (i.e., laid my claim to him) previously, when I'd only said a brief "hi" to him while running across the sales floor to grab something for another customer. But it was the principle of the matter, dammit. (Unfortunately, that principle meant trying to ring up two customers at once since I was in the process of fixing another customer's order. The cell phone guy had to wait forever for me to get to him properly.) The worst part is, Moe gave me a dirty look for even telling him I had spoken to that customer when he'd just rang up one guy for three phones.

Then he went on to completely ignore the people on the floor so he could call up another customer who wanted to process a cell phone order over the phone. Whee.

To top it off, when I left to finally get something to eat he got another rush. Milder, sure, but he sold a few more cell phones then too. (The guy who called up earlier came in, I guess.) Now from this story, it sounds like we get cell orders all the time, but we don't. In fact, the guy today was only my second ever. The store is seriously hurting for that business. As such, there's really no recourse. Jerald's doing what the company wants us to do, basically, which is focus on the items that make it the most money. But it's unfair to the customers, unfair to the salespeople, and basically wrong. I'm all in favor of making money, but piss off enough customers and then what?

I have to get out of this business, fast. I can't believe I'm actually quibbling about a hundred bucks. Look what I've become.


* Not his real name, obviously.

© 2003, Ted the Henchman™

If my blog had an eerie resemblance to that of Hollywood Actor Beck Bristow's, you'd tell me, right?

Right?

(crickets chirp)

And now... The Prime Number Shitting Bear.

Study: Hot Chicks Make Men Act Like Morons.

This is news?

I know that the public has been clamoring for it, so let me announce the return of the public archive of the works of The Assorted Lunatics, Pink Floyd humorists extraordinaire. This should just be a temporary home until I get a separate URL and pretty up the HTML, but the basics are there and are just as funny as ever.

Feel free to interpret that last statement as you see fit.

The solution to the high cost of health care? Monkey hospitals.

My new favorite joke: Knock knock.
Who's there?
Fuck you.

Drive a cartoon character's car... only 69,995.

For some reason, Yahoo just moved all my e-mail to the trash.

Well, at least they didn't just erase them wholesale.

Good lord... I should either be writing or asleep, but I can't seem to do either. I just read this article, and it didn't seem to help any. Two years ago, my friend Matt and I were both more or less starting from nothing. We were both pretty miserable, but we were working together on this little website called Savant and chatting pretty regularly about how much of a struggle everything was. The difference was, I was working a steady job in sales and he was struggling with his design studio. He and his girlfriend were in dire straits, and I had just endured a series of miserable relationships, if you can call them that.

Now, he's happily married, owns part of his own thriving media company, he's writing for, you know, money, and travelling all over the world. Me? I'm working a shit job for pennies, struggling to get published, still enduring a series of miserable relationships, my health is questionable (and my insurance non-existent), and I'm swimming in debt.

It makes me want to eat broken glass.

What the hell happened?

Matt once told me perhaps the most depressing thing I'd ever heard, which is that life is pain, interrupted by moments of happiness. At the time, I had refused to believe this philosophy, because it seemed so nihilistic, but subsequently it infiltrated my thinking to a degree that I can't tell where the theory starts and the practice ends. It's become pervasive for me, but I have to wonder whether young Matt feels the same way anymore. I'd ask him, but we almost never speak anymore. He's just too busy, and so am I, but in entirely different ways.

It doesn't help that I've been reading the latest issue of Esquire, which is their annual "What I've Learned" issue, wherein fabulously successful people all say about the same thing, which is that achieving success is a state of mind. Well, what sort of thing is that for, say, me to read, or better yet, some dirt poor kid in the African desert? Maybe they're right, but it seems like a catch-22 to me.

I don't know. I'm mainly writing this for myself, so that, someday, I can either look back on it as the point when it felt like I'd gone so far into the tunnel that I'd lost the light from both ends, or I'll see it as the point when I'd realized the tunnel was a dead-end and there was no going back. (Or perhaps just the day when I'd finally abused metaphors to death.) I don't expect life to be handed to me on a silver platter, but it would be nice to get the occasional good break that I could stow away to keep me going until the next one.

Then again, it's entirely possible that I just don't know appreciate the good breaks I've got. I don't know.

What I do know is that I really shouldn't compare myself to Matty. I mean, as much as I admire what he's achieved and obtained, I shouldn't model myself after him. I always get myself into trouble when I try to emulate and imitate people. But then, in the absence of a good role model or a mentor, it's practically impossible to find your own route without at least some of that. So I wind up back at square one. (And don't think that I resent his success. I'm happy for him, I really am; I just wish I had the slightest clue how we ended up in such different places. Not to mention barely speaking to one another.)

About the only time I'm really happy is when I'm writing, but I seem to get so little of that done lately because I'm either trying to cover too many bases or fretting about the quality of what I've done. It's a bit like writing my way up my own ass. (Kind of like what I'm doing here, I suspect.)

I don't know. I think too much. And the trouble with that is that it tends to lead in circles, so if I'm depressed, I just get even moreso. The best thing to do is just cut it off before it gets out of control. So I'm going to bed.

Anyway, congrats, Matt...

If you like Michael Jackson's Number Ones...

A report from Ted the Henchman™, which, I should point out, is entirely fictional:

We had two guys come in to the store today and offer to clean our parking lots for cash. I almost got defensive... Hey, that's my job! Except, you know, it's not.

But those guys were just minor curiosities. The real nastiness today came from this woman who harangued me for a full half hour because she wanted to return a phone that she'd bought three years ago, which was still under warantee. We'd replaced it a few months ago, and she said it didn't work anymore, but she wouldn't take a replacement. She wanted her money back. Basically, she just wanted money, and she was using the old "abuse the help until they give you what you want" routine. Now, I've used a variation on this in the past, which is just to refuse your options until the only one left is to get cash, but this woman (whose name is Dolores; hi, Dori, you raving bitch...) was just incredibly mean. Now, I'm still in the traning phase here, and the other employee who was there did what she always does, which was to give me blank looks whenever I ask direct questions and then disappear. And the manager was gone, so I was stuck.

Finally, I lost my temper with this woman, only a little bit, which was bad, but I had no idea how long this abuse was going to go on for, and at that point I hadn't caught on to her game. This, of course, was just what she wanted, and I wisely backed away from a confrontation, but then she wanted to report me. My first thought was, if they want to fire me over this, then I don't really want to work here. No, scratch that. I don't want to work here anyway, but if this is what I have to put up with, forget it. I'll clean parking lots for spare change.

I made a few calls to my overlord's cell phone, and she didn't like any of the options he presented to me, so I told her she had to wait until he got back. She didn't like this, and insisted upon calling the customer service number, which I happily gave to her, along with my name. She dialed the number, and from what I can tell, wrestled with the computer for a bit and then stormed off without lodging any real complaint. And, oddly enough, for the rest of the day, I was in a much better mood, though I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it was just that the rest of the oddballs we get in there seemed easy by comparison, or perhaps it was that I hadn't let Dori get the best of me. Who knows?

On my drive home, I came up with all sorts of imaginative phone pranks I could have played on Dori, but I resisted the urge because I suddenly saw myself, a grown man, making prank phone calls. Actually, what I envisioned was just quitting the damned job, which would remove me from all legal obligations, thus allowing me to call this woman and tell me what I really thought of her. In the end, this scenario seemed less satisfying than it seemed at first, so I just let it go. With my luck, I'd wind up with a restraining order and 500 hours of community service or something...

©2003 Ted the Henchman™

Good lord, did you ever catch yourself thinking, "I'd give anything to go back to college."? Does that mean I've peaked? Is it all really downhill from there?

Feh. I want my money back.

Well, at least I'm not this guy.

Okay, I'll cop to it: I watch Everwood. It's my secret shame: I willingly watch a WB teen drama. It all started because I found the female lead absurdly cute, even though she's playing a character that's about half my age. But the way the show walks the fine line between relatively smart drama and dopey soap opera. Then, as I watched the Thanksgiving episode, I realized something: This show is secretly about making the young girl, Delia, into a serial killer.

First her mom dies in a car wreck. Then they make her best friend into a hermaphrodite, who has to stop playing with her because he's acting too girly. Then her college-age babysitter gets fired for making out with her older brother, who's just in high school. And her dad just got involved with this woman she hates, who also happens to have HIV.

I'm telling you, this girl's going to start torturing small animals before she's in junior high...

Quick dispatch from Ted the Henchman™:

Today, my coworked tuned the company TV to professional wrestling for two hours and wouldn't let me change the station. "Welcome to hell," he said.

Next time he does that, I'm going to bludgeon him with a baseball bat.

© 2003 Ted the Henchman.

Here's a heartwarming story from the gossip section:

Wyclef Jean still dines out on his days of manning the counter at Burger King. "I'd say to my boss, 'One day, I'm going to be a big superstar,'" the ex-Fugee tells Webster Hall curator Baird Jones. "He'd say, 'Listen, give me nine Whoppers, six fries and hold the dream.' Recently, I was driving past that same Burger King. That same manager started gushing, 'Jean, I see your music is doing really well!' I made sure I asked him for nine Whoppers."

I've read the letter, and all I can say, Mr. Disney, is... ouch.