"File Under: 'Disaster'"

Looking back, it all started with the woman’s son.

I was at my best friend’s fifth birthday party, happily playing with a toy, when BAM! I got clocked and went down like a ton of bricks. Unbeknownst to me, this woman’s son wanted to play with the same toy and felt the best way to handle it was to punch my ass out and take it from me.[1]

Now fast-forward the tape of my life ‘til where I’m twenty-three and we’re ready for round two.

So this kid’s mom owns and runs a filing business that does, amongst nothing else, filing work and, I, twenty-three years old and fully recovered from her son’s beating, have just completed my junior year of college (I’m not dumb or a slacker—I didn’t got to college straight out of high school) and am sorely in need of some summer-time employment. So, bing!, idea, I decide to try working for her and I give her a call.

This is where things get weird.

Somehow, despite the fact that I totally know this woman, having spoken and spent time with her on numerous occasions; that we share a close mutual friend (the family of the kid whose birthday party her son punched me at); and that my older brother worked for her before and she knows my mom and her son, who I went to high school with and hung out with some—we end up getting along all right—knocked me out and that I saw and talked to her days before placing aforementioned call, she has no idea who I am. But, after I explain some of the above connections, she seems to remember me and, voila, I land a four-day filing gig, which is to begin on Wednesday, run through ‘til Friday, at which point we skip the weekend, and end on the following Monday.

Work. Day one. I get picked up and the woman is still a bit hazy on who the hell I am, but again with me throwing out some of our connections, she remembers me—again.

Down to business: I’m the new guy, and being the new guy, I feel it’s imperative to get off on the right foot work-wise and also not to overstep my bounds, so I try and focus intently on my work and I don’t really speak unless spoken to. Overall, the day goes without incident and I feel good about my first day’s performance.

This brings us to: Day two. Again, I work hard, but I decide that I need to chat it up more, bring something to the table talk-wise, you know? So I try and pick my moments, but as I have a tendency (I do it pretty much all the time) I get overly excited and overly talkative—gregarious, if you will—and talk probably too much. There is also a great deal of concern that day about the speed at which we must complete the job and she mentions to me that I need to work faster, and so I try to up the quickness with which I file. Then on the ride home, I, again probably talk too much and it is decided, the possibility having been brought up that day at work, that, because another one of her other jobs is behind, people will need to be shifted to that job, and subsequently my presence will not be required on Friday and that she’ll call me about Monday.

This turn of events strikes me as not good. But I shrug it off. I’ll be back in action Monday, I tell myself. However, as I laid in bed that Saturday night, having not yet heard from her about Monday, I suddenly got frightened and began to wonder if she was greasing me off—by the way, for anyone who doesn’t know what getting greased off means, it’s basically when someone is trying to get rid of you by ceasing any and all contact with you; also don’t feel like you’re out of the loop or not hip or something because you haven’t heard this term, because I totally made it up and no one else except me uses it.

ANYWAY, I again assured myself that she wouldn’t do this, seeing as how it seemed very unprofessional and something even I wouldn’t do, yet by Sunday I still hadn’t heard from her, so I called her to inquire about the details of Monday and that’s when she TKO from Tokyo’d me Piston Honda-style, saying: “You know what, John. Your work was meticulous: absolutely no mistakes. But I’m afraid speed just isn’t your forte.” She then went on to explain that speed had to be one’s forte in the filing business and that, this, meaning me working for her, was not going to work out, which meant, more or less, that I was headed for the welfare line[2].

Crushed, I sat in my kitchen strumming my acoustic guitar as my mom attempted to console me until my younger brother, upon entering and hearing the news, made fun of me, claiming that a monkey could do that job (perhaps, a monkey whose forte was speed) and I sat there, punch-drunk, nothing left to do but laugh at myself, especially at the fact that I had to call her just so I could be given the boot properly.



[1] To his credit, it worked: he got the toy.
[2] I think it’s fair to say that overall I have not done well with this family.