Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.: A Collection Of New Essays (2 page)

“Hello, my name is Melissa and I was wondering if anyone in this office would be interested in purchasing items from a fabulous selection of fabulous gifts and gadgets?”

“Do they make you say that?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You said the word fabulous twice. Was it supposed to be ‘a fabulous selection’ or ‘fabulous gifts and gadgets’?”

“Fabulous gifts and gadgets,” she answered, “It’s my first day.”

“How’s it working out? Are you selling lots of gifts and gadgets?”

“No.”

“Do you want a better job?”

She doesn’t have to do much. Apart from answering and redirecting the occasional incoming call, she mainly just sits at her desk flicking between Facebook and Twitter. Once, while presenting to a client, I popped my head out to ask her if she’d mind making coffees and she tweeted, “OMG, idiot at work just told me to make coffee. #imnotyourfuckingslave #spit.”

I didn’t see the tweet until after the presentation so I’m fairly sure I drank coffee with spit in it.

.....................................

From
: Jennifer Haines

To
: David Thorne

Subject
: Melissa

David,

All staff recruitment is to be approved by the HR department. Under no circumstances do you have authority to offer anyone a position here. Melissa has zero experience, zero qualifications and zero knowledge of the position. Furthermore, she is not your cousin and the entire story about her parents dying in a fire was fabricated. I’ve spoken to her and she knows nothing about it. She has been given a trial period but do not let this happen again.

Jennifer

.....................................

The phone rang again.

“Ben wants to speak to you.” said Melissa,  “He’s on line 3.”

Click.

“Hurro? Mr Moshiyoto?” I said in an old Asian woman’s voice as per procedure. I can’t recall why Ben and I started doing this but it would be weird to start answering the phone normally now. 

“Terrible,” said Ben, “I could tell it was you. It sounded more like a Mexican man with emphysema than an Asian woman. Hey, I was just wondering, do you like the band Linkin Park?”

When a client is given a timeline for project completion of, say, three weeks, this does not mean the project takes three weeks to complete. It means somewhere between looking at photos of cabbages, closing bathroom doors, discussing weapons of choice during a zombie apocalypse, answering phone calls, making your own coffee and drawing flags, a few hours will be spent quickly throwing their project together. Often those few hours will be allocated to the few hours before the client arrives to view what you have been working on for three weeks.

I once designed a logo while a client waited in the foyer. Melissa entertained them with an explanation of why she chose to wear boots with leggings rather than boots with a dress that day while I turned an 8 sideways to make an infinity symbol, chopped a bit out of one of the loops, and turned it orange. The new logo was presented ten minutes later to the client, a large financial investment company, as “a graphic representation of koi which are symbolic of wealth in Japanese culture.”  

“It’s beautiful. Simple yet balanced, solid yet flowing. I also love the typeface you used for our name, what’s it called?”

“Helvetica.”

“Just stunning.”

A few years before, while working for an Australian design agency called De Masi Jones, I was commissioned to come up with a new name and branding for a flight training company. Forgetting about the project until the day due, they were presented with the name ‘Altara’ and told it was an aboriginal word, from the Boonjari tribe, meaning ‘above the clouds’. The client was happy and Altara is now an established brand in the aeronautics industry. There is no such thing as the Boonjari tribe.

While it is entirely possible that spending time allocated to a project on the actual project might produce a better result, it’s a scenario I have no experience with or expectations of.

“We charged the client for 132 hours, how many hours were spent?”

“132”

“Oh no, what happened? We will never make money like that.”

“I’m kidding, it was 2.”

“Thank god. By the way, have I shown you my new golf clubs? I’ll bring them upstairs to your office and demonstrate club selection, stance, swing and follow-through even though you have no interest in the subject. Kevin, would you like to join me? While I’m setting up a makeshift putting green, you can explain to David the importance of good soil drainage.”

Kevin returned a short time later and made his way into my office.

“The spears look better,” he commented, “one’s a bit bent though. It wouldn’t be very aerodynamic.”

“What can I help you with, Kevin?”

“I just want to show you something,” he replied, taking out his iPhone.

“Fantastic, I hope it’s a photo of cabbage.”

“Look... no, that’s not... here it is!”

The photo showed Kevin, down on one knee, holding a measuring tape across the top of a cabbage.

“Eleven and a half inches,” he proclaimed proudly, “The key is making sure the soil has a pH balance between 6.5 and 7.5.”

I saw a show on television recently in which a man wearing a green John Deere cap rolled his dead coworker up in a rug and threw him off a bridge. I came in late to the program so I have no idea how either of them came to be in this situation but I assume they fought over corn or something.

The rug was nice, white with a subtle chequered pattern, and I thought it highly unlikely that someone who wears a John Deere cap would own a contemporary rug like that. People who wear John Deere caps prefer ornate things. A contemporary rug wouldn’t go with their green velour couch or the maple and glass cabinet containing ceramic horse figurines. An Oriental or Persian looking rug would make more sense. It wouldn’t show the dirt as much. I looked online and found the exact white chequered rug at IKEA for $299 so I ordered it. People who wear John Deere caps don’t shop online, or at IKEA, they shop at Grande Home Furnishings & Mattresses.

The man wearing a green John Deere cap was apprehended fairly quickly as the contemporary rug was discovered the next morning with his fingerprints all over the rubber backing. His prints were on file as he had a prior arrest for stealing three rolls of fencing wire from the back of a hardware store. If I ever have to roll a coworker up in a rug and throw him off a bridge, I will remember to  roll him up with the carpeted side facing outwards. I will also take a flashlight with me to check if the creek has any water in it.  Also, if I regularly wore a green John Deere cap, I would swap it out for the occasion, perhaps with a beanie, just in case a homeless person living under the bridge later agrees to serve as witness for the prosecution.

I rolled up our new IKEA rug a few days ago and took it down to the basement. One of our dogs took a huge dump on it and I couldn’t get out the stain. I tried moving the furniture around to hide it but wasn’t happy with the layout. The rug was pretty heavy. I had to drag it most of the way and needed a nap afterwards. The man wearing a green John Deere cap must have been a lot stronger than me, probably from years of lifting pigs and polishing his tractor, as there’s no way I’d manage to lift a rug over a railing if it included a body.

A better solution might be to strap the rug to the roof of your car and park really close to the edge so it can be rolled off - or, keep the rug, especially if it’s a nice one, drive the dead coworker out into a forested area, or a park if you live in the city, and sit them against a tree with a compass in one hand and a map of a completely different area in the other. This way it would appear they simply got lost while hiking and did not possess the necessary survival skills to find their way out. You could leave a bag of trail mix with only the bits nobody likes left in their pocket to allay suspicion.

If the coworker is known to enjoy hiking, people will say, “Oh yes, he often went hiking, at least he died doing what he loved,” and if he is not the type to go hiking, it will explain why he was so bad at it. Before leaving the office and heading out to the forested area, you could use his computer to send the secretary an email stating, “I’m completely out of pens. Could I have one of the nice Pilot ones and a couple of Bics from the supply cabinet please? Also, I’m going for a hike.”  To prevent this ever happening to me, I tell everyone in the office once a day that I have no interest whatsoever in hiking.

I’ve been hiking. It was recently and it was dreadful. There were steep hills, bushes with barbs, and spiders. These are things I usually go out of my way to avoid. Every four or five steps I walked into webs stretched across trees and most of them housed spiders that looked like mushrooms with legs. After the first few dozen, I made my hiking companion Ben - a copywriter I worked with that had convinced me to join him through deceptive descriptions of light-dappled paths beside streams - walk ahead of me. 

I saw a documentary years ago about a six-year-old child with a medical condition called Progeria that aged him faster than normal. His skin looked like a Spacesaver bag with the air sucked out and while he was talking to the camera about his favourite toy, a Buzz Lightyear action figure with flick-out wings, one of his teeth fell out. He was short and skinny and had a huge wrinkly head shaped like a potato. I’d asked Ben many times if he had this condition but he said he didn’t.

“I haven’t walked into any spider webs,” he declared after a short time. This was due to Ben’s small proportions while the spiders, seemingly on purpose, hung at normal human level. I tried convincing him to puff up his beanie like a gnome’s hat but he refused stating, “that’s not how beanies are worn,” and, “there could be other hikers on the path and I might forget to flatten my beanie back down before they see me.”

As such, I spent the next several miles waving a stick frantically in front of me before each step. If I hadn’t been so pre-occupied with waving a stick, I might have noticed the deep muddy hole. Miserably swishing my stick and describing to Ben all the things I would rather be doing than hiking, my left leg suddenly disappeared to the knee. Jolted sideways, my upper half fell into a bush that combined all the joys of hiking by featuring not only barbs, but several webs and spiders and one of those weird sack things that looks a bit like a spider web but is full of hundreds of little worms. The next few seconds were a blur but included screaming.

Reaching out for Ben, expecting his hand to be there waiting, I stared down the path to see him shaking his head as he disappeared around a bend.

“Ben!” I yelled. No reply. “BEN!”

Under no delusion of possessing the necessary survival skills to find my way should Ben get too far ahead of me, I pivoted into an uprightish position and, with a huge slurping noise, managed to pull my leg free. As my calf and foot were now surrounded by several inches of blackish sludge, it took me a moment to realise that my boot had stayed behind.

I was a bit upset by this as I’d purchased the boots a few days before from Zappo’s specifically for the occasion. They sent me brown ones instead of the black ones I ordered and I didn’t have time to return them so I’d spent a good couple of hours colouring them in with a Sharpie the night before. As far as I was concerned, this was the end of the hike and we would probably have to be rescued.

I poked the muddy hole a few times with my spider stick, which produced no result, then chased after Ben with a kind of ‘big step, little step’ gait while waving my stick in front. Rather than the thick mud around my foot falling off, or at least providing some form of protection from dirt and rocks on the path, the dirt and rocks adhered to the mud, forming a large conglomerate of misery.

“Ben,” I yelled, cupping my free hand around my mouth because that’s how you yell in the forest, “I lost my boot. Wait.”

Rounding the bend, I discovered Ben sitting cross-legged on a rock, sipping from a tube that went over his shoulder into his backpack. He was obviously going for the ‘one with nature’ thing but looked more like the weird worm thing from Alice in Wonderland that sits on a mushroom. I told him this.

“Look,” I also declared, indicating the mass surrounding my foot, “what are we going to do?”

“Take your sock off,” Ben replied.

This was sound advice so I argued against it for a bit before peeling it off.

“How much longer before we get to the car?” I craned my neck to peer up the path hopefully.

“What do you mean? It depends on when we stop and turn back.”

I had, up until that point, assumed we were walking on some kind of loop that would eventually take us back to our starting point. Which is the problem with copywriters. They leave out important information and fill the void with lies about light-dappled paths beside streams.

This deception is not constrained to forest-based activities either. A few weeks prior to the hike, Ben tricked me into attending a party at his house by stating it would be fun and full of interesting people. Instead, Ben’s girlfriend gave a half hour presentation about something called Herbalife to Ben, myself, and Ben’s parents.

I was home, with a large tub of protein-shake mix, in time to watch The Bachelor. I must have misunderstood part of the presentation because each month for the next year, I received a new tub of protein-shake mix, an invoice for forty-eight dollars, and instructions on how to hold my own Herbalife parties.

Also, I once tried on Ben’s black-rimmed glasses, to see how bad his eyesight was, and the lenses had zero magnification.

Which, I suppose, is no different from styling your hair a certain way or wearing attire that presents to others who you want to be. 

When I was eight, I wore a scarf for almost a year, regardless of the temperature, because someone told me it looked Bohemian. I had no idea what Bohemian meant but I knew it had something to do with the band Queen and the movie Flash Gordon was very popular at the time.

You only have to enter a Walmart in Virginia to experience what the world would be like if everyone stopped caring.

“Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty wiper blades. We should get them.”

I recently visited a Walmart at 2am with my fifteen-year-old offspring Seb to purchase paintball gun ammunition. On the way back to our vehicle, an elderly lady wearing a nightie asked politely if we wanted to buy a cat. She had a whole box of them. Seb peered into the box looking worried.

“Are they alive?” he asked.

The lady rummaged in the box for a bit and held one up.

“This one is,” she said.

Seb drove to Walmart that night. He wasn’t legally allowed to operate a motor vehicle yet but I’d let him drive around the block a few times and once to the hardware store to practice. We live in a small village an hour or so from D.C. and the term ‘peak hour traffic’ refers to there being more tractors on the road than usual.

“Hey Seb, remember that time you rubbed poo on the walls? You were two.”

“No.”

“Well you did. All four walls of your bedroom. It was disgusting. Watch out for the tree.”

“What tree?”

“All the trees. Being alert of all possible hazards, immediate and pending, is the key to being a good driver.”

“The tree isn’t going to jump out onto the road. Telling me to watch out for things that I don’t have to watch out for is just distracting.”

“Fine.  Watch out for that wheelie bin.”

“Dad.”

“It was sticking out from the curb a bit.”

“Not really.”

“Yes it was. It could have wheelie bin dangerous.”

“Hmm.”

“Get it? Wheelie bin dangerous.”

“Yes, I get it. It just wasn’t very funny.”

“Yes it was.  I love you so much.”

“What?”

“I said I love you so much.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m very proud of you.”

“Why are you telling me this? Are you dying?”

“No, if I was dying you’d know about it. I’d milk the sympathy to the last drop. I’m just feeling a bit sentimental. It seems like only yesterday you were rubbing poo on walls and now you’re driving. I’ll blink and you will have kids of your own. I hope they rub poo on your walls. Then you will blink and they will be driving. It’s the circle of life. Like in The Lion King.”

“Not really.”

“Yes it is. I’m the dad lion, what’s his name, Mufasa? And you’re that other one.”

“Simba.”

“No, what’s the warthog’s name?”

“Pumbaa?”

“That’s the one. One moment Pumbaa Junior will be rubbing poo on your walls and the next, you’ll be letting him drive to Walmart. Try to remember the wheelie bin joke for when that happens.”

The purpose for the 2am excursion was that I’d agreed to participate in a paintball match the next day with a coworker named Simon and while up late researching the topic, I’d read that if you put the paintballs in the freezer overnight, they hurt a lot more. As it turned out, Simon and I were placed on the same team but that just made it easier to get a clean shot.

For those that have never played Paintball,  it is exactly like those mediaeval gatherings where a group of people named Timothy and Geoffrey don chainmail and rush at each-other in the forest with wooden swords for king and honour. Except with guns that shoot things that look like those little balls you put in the bath. The ones that dissolve and make the water smell nice that generally come with a bar of soap in a little wicker basket wrapped in cellophane that people you couldn’t care less about are given as Christmas presents.  I received one last year as my staff  ‘Secret Santa’ present and it still had a little tag attached with gold ribbon that read, “To Sarah, Merry Xmas 04.”  This annoyed me somewhat as I had actually put some thought into my gift. Louise, who is quite fat, seemed quite overwhelmed with her trial subscription to Weight Watchers Online.