A Dark and Stormy Knight

Let me tell you about my Saturday.

I worked from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. That’s a light shift, but the customers were pretty insane. I’ve noticed (with some pleasant surprise, mind you) that I am actually at considerable ease behind a cash register for the holiday rush. I have a very thick skin, and I don’t take anything personally. Because how can anything be personal? Seriously, I feel more like this job is nothing but an “under cover” assignment. That’s about how seriously I take any of this so-called customer service “pressure” that I’ve been hearing so much about the past several years. I’ve been through way too much shit to be perturbed by an impatient customer with an inflated sense of urgency and self-importance. That is not to say that I don’t respect the customer’s time, but come on--some things are seriously just not worth getting worked up over.

Oh yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “Yeah, but it’s still before Thanksgiving. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” That’s the same smug bullshit I’m talking about. Today was NVTS. If the infamous day-after-Thanksgiving is just a marathon of the worst parts of today, then I say bring it on. It’s grueling, to be sure, but it’s not nearly the nightmare people had been telling me for years I’d never be cut out for. Quite frankly, I’m deeply offended at the assumption that I couldn’t handle this shit. All the people who told me throughout the years that their experiences in customer service were too rough-and-tumble for me to handle… all I have to say is…

What a bunch of pussies.

I’ve seen my dreams shattered, I’ve been publicly humiliated, I’ve given speeches and bared my soul before concert halls full of scrutinizing half-friends and strangers alike. I’ve faced fearless opponents in hand-to-hand sparring matches. I’ve lost and found and lost again all hope. I’ve seen beautiful and hideous moments. I have a Herculean work ethic on top of it all. And some people actually had me convinced that working a cash register was too much to handle. Fuck you. Fuck you with a rusty egg beater.

One woman apparently was convinced that such things were so important today. She forgot her place in the Grand Scheme of Things, and decided that she would start screaming at my coworker over what appeared to be a five-dollar discrepancy. I don’t know, I only caught part of the context. The cash registers at Gordman’s are in bunkers of two registers per counter, see, so this was all going on right behind my back as I faced the other way, struggling in vain to suppress a very amused grin. The customers I was serving looked just as amused at the display of irrational rage and asked me, “Is it all right if I yell at you like that?” Without missing a beat, I responded, “You can. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

What I had to make a conscious effort not to say was, “It’s amusing how some people have such an inflated sense of urgency and self-importance. It must be nice to be the center of the universe.”

It’s ironic that by wearing a name tag one immediately becomes dehumanized. I would have thought that having your given name emblazoned across your left nipple would make you somehow more familiar, but I guess it just means that you are part of a system--a system composed of computers and algorithms that try to screw you out of your money and are therefore instantly vilified.

Personally, nothing at my job has yet made me stressed out or offended. It’s all a very fascinating experience, observing humanity and having my earlier cynical rants from the past year proved absolutely accurate.

That’s about all I ever want to blog about work. It’s a cashier job. Seriously. From here on out, you can just use your imagination. It doesn’t warrant any further blogging. I had a point to all this, and it’s not that customers suck or that it’s not that bad or that it’s worse or whatever you may have interpreted.

That was just the intro. On to the real substance of this post…

3:00 rolls around, and the fast-paced “stress” of a sea of impatient holiday customers proved to be an almost Zen-like escapist experience for me. I was getting a little frayed, but that’s only because of caffeine withdrawal. I had been mercifully incapable of thinking about my personal life during the insane moments of work.

Then I went back to the house for a late lunch before cleaning my bathroom and eventually heading out to a coffee shop to finally unwind. It’s funny, though… the hour or two that I was home after work was ten times more stressful than five hours of psychotic customers. I guess that’s the difference between two hundred pushy strangers… and one sister-in-law.

So I went to The Crooked Tree, a coffee shop I go to when I’m not in the mood for Picasso’s. So there I am, listening to Trans-Siberian Orchestra, catching up on some online stuff, unwinding. The Captain called, and I sat there on the phone bantering about James Bond, Jack Sparrow, and everything in between… because the Captain is just that good at maintaining movie-related conversation. It was nice.

Having been forced not to eat lunch until 3:30, I wasn’t hungry for dinner until 9-ish, so after hanging out at the coffee shop I headed back to the house once more. I dropped off my computer, scarfed down some food, and headed out with the half-true proclamation that I was going to see some live jazz at Picasso’s. The band turned out not to be jazz, so I didn’t stay. I continued on, in search of a place to lie low for a while until my family would be asleep. I wanted to disappear for a night, but I wasn’t in the mood to wander the casino yet again.

Inevitably, I was in a sour mood. Yeah, I wanted to “unwind,” but I was fairly bitter that I felt more or less forced to stalk the night alone, killing time before bed. Inevitably… of course… I found myself listening to The Dark Knight. I can’t stop… it’s… just so good. It might be one of my favorite film scores of all time. It’s… really… that… good. It’s empowering, too.

I decided, “Screw it, I’m going to sit someplace and have a beer. I have job. If I want a beer on a Saturday night, I’m having a beer. I’m not looking to get drunk by myself. I haven’t been drunk since June 14. I just want a beer.”

The world was less than accommodating.

I could not find a laid-back bar anywhere in St. Charles.

I drove and walked and walked and drove. Like a wraith in the night, I drifted in and out of countless group conversations and mirror images of chapters of my own social past. There were Christmas lights on Main Street, but I wasn’t listening to Frank Sinatra or Vince Guaraldi. I listened to The Dark Knight.

I was getting increasingly agitated that I was unable to unwind either at the house or at large.

Eventually, after listening to the whole album twice, I found myself at a sports bar with a Killian’s in hand. Mission accomplished. I preferred to sit in the shadiest part of the bar, strategizing for my next big move, mentally tabulating all the points that had crossed my mind earlier that day. I was, for better or worse, the brooding, dark stranger at the bar. And I watched humanity some more. The people I once sought to defend.

Unfortunately, the bar crowd only grew in size and decibels, finally even encroaching on my personal space when a party of four coed 50-year-olds sat on the stools next to me. No buffer space.

One of the female bartenders seemed to have a Playboy-esque level of celebrity (and she looked the part). The tipsy gentlemen hitting on her were an expected cliché, but what I didn’t expect was how the older party of four seemed to be just as interested in talking to her. I guess she was so striking that even the women wanted to talk to her. Interesting phenomenon.

Anyway, by the end of the night, the people who had encroached on my personal space had reached the point where “conversational” became “badgering.” From what I could gather, this girl was engaged to get married in June 2010 when her boyfriend finished school, and she herself had a Master’s in Biology. She didn’t want to teach, but she didn’t want to do lab work. So she had a Master’s in something she loved but didn’t have a path to follow with it. Sounds familiar.

Wait for it…

So this girl was becoming visibly (or at least “visibly” to someone reasonably sober and astute, like myself) less chipper than the “customer service” mode she had been in all night. She was cornered, really. She had to carefully attempt to sidestep invasive questions she didn’t have the inclination to answer. And then… I became personally offended. Because one lady said, “You kids these days, you get worthless degrees without thinking how it can be useful in life…”

I couldn’t help but wonder what that woman had “accomplished" in life.

And how obtuse do you have to be to point out to the person serving your drinks that she can’t get a job? That pissed me off, too. But I watched, patient yet unforgiving.

The server politely (with the hint of an edge) asserted that she had a job that she was happy with. She was a bartender, paying the bills by working only two days a week (bleached hair and cleavage earns a lot of tips). For now, that was enough for her. I could relate.

I was the dark stranger at the tavern, keeping to myself, keeping one eye on everyone else at the bar. I was the silent one you ignore until he moves in for the kill.

I realized that I was in a beautiful position. I had put up with a fair amount of customer bullshit earlier that day, and I was on the other side of the counter now. That meant I could get away with anything. Furthermore, I could speak up and say all the scathing and brilliant things that the cornered bartender couldn’t say on the job but wanted to.

Except that I went there to unwind. I wasn’t out to be a hero.

I’m not a hero. I’m just a bard. I observe. And I bear witness.

When stepping off to the side to check up on my beer progress, she let her guard down with a candid tone and asked me, “Are you enjoying the show?”

That was when I told her, “You seem to have a certain level of celebrity around here. For what it’s worth, I have a Master’s in Music—though I’m not about to broadcast it here—and I just took a job as a seasonal cashier.”

Relief registered on her face. “Then you feel my pain!”

“Yeah, the job market is tough out there,” I assured her.

She replied, emphatically, “It’s fucking tough!”

I came back with, “It’s impossibly tough!”

Now, I’m not really sure how official qualifiers like “fucking” and “impossibly” really are, but we English-speakers are doing our best to agree on the specifics of a language. The meaning was clear at the time.

I paid for my drink and left the bar, painfully sober as usual. Saturday was over. Despite the extraordinary lengths I went to try to unwind, my free time had ended up being more stressful than my actual work, and I ended up even more disgusted with humanity that I had been before.

It was a bad day for my outlook on the human race.

I guess a sports bar isn’t the best place to restore your hope in humanity, what with all the horny walking penises and ditsy drunk-banterers. But the bartender was far brighter than anyone in there, perhaps even myself. Sometimes you find the sharpest people in the most unlikely of places. They are rare, but they are out there, somewhere deep within the night, drowning in a sea of mammals who have permanently achieved Lower Consciousness.

So I retreated once more into the anonymity of night, where I seem to feel most at home. I’m not going back there. Not even for the bartender.

I’d rather be forgotten.

I work best that way.