The Cost of Paying Attention

I won’t lie, I can be absent-minded at times. Actually, I can be that way quite often. It’s not so much that I don’t know how to focus, but rather that I focus on certain things while I lose focus on other things. And sometimes those other things are things that should have been focused on. And sometimes there are consequences for not focusing on those things that should have been focused on.

Before you, ask, no, I have never gotten anyone killed or severely hurt. To my knowledge… shit, I don’t know, I don’t think I have, but I guess I might not have paid attention to it if I had.

I’m talking about issues that led to my own detriment, usually by embarrassment. Here’s what I mean, I’ll start by asking you, the reader, something. Have you ever gone to the bathroom in the wrong bathroom by accident? You wandered into the male bathroom as a female or the female bathroom as a male? Have you done it at least once in your life, just by sheer bad luck of not paying attention or by rushing by the sign and thinking it was the right one for you and not caring because of how bad you had to go? No judgement here. Those of you that have, just picture that time for a moment.

Now imagine that it occurred at a sporting event. And I don’t mean an event that you’re going to watch. I mean one that you’re going to compete at. You’ve done that, right?

...yeah. I’ll explain.

It was middle school, and I was playing football. I had never played organized football before and discovered that I wasn’t very good at football, but I had made the B team and was still having fun. This particular event in time took place at the football game against Grapevine Middle School. To be more precise, it took place at halftime. I had been holding ‘it’ for most of the first half of the game, and when the buzzer for the end of the half came, I rushed off as quickly as I could to the restroom. Now, this was an away game, so I was not exactly keen to the location for where stuff was at this school. I only knew where one particular bathroom was, because it was connected to the concession stand. So I rush around the back of the building, slink into the door that I know is a restroom for whatever reason, jump into a stall, and get to ‘going’, as I needed to get it out ASAP.

After the initial relief of commencing my bowel decompression, I take a second to recall my last few moments and try to think of how much time I’ll have left before the game starts back up, and it occurs to me that I don’t quite remember the bathroom the way that I had before. I start to think, wasn’t the bathroom on the other side of the building last time I was over at this field? And when I rushed into this stall that I’m crapping in, did I see any stand-up urinals? Isn’t that a bit weird, they almost always have those in this type of bathroom, don’t they? And as I’m going through this mental replay of the last few minutes, I hear the door open at the other side of the bathroom, and the following conversation begins:

“Oh my God, did you see what Jodee was wearing? She’s gained so much weight,” said one high pitched and flippant voice. My eyes grow wide.

“I know, I’m so glad. I always hated that bitch!” chimed in another. Everything clicks in my mind. I begin to panic.

They started to recall all of the shitty things they had to say about Jodee as I weigh my options. I could just walk out casually, give them the head nod. Or I could just bolt, and pray that they don’t have time to notice until I’m halfway out of the door. Or I could just lay low, and wait for them to leave, and pray that no one else comes in before I have time to leave through the same door I came in. I decide that this plan will be the best plan I have to work with, and then I hear one of the voices say, “Oh shit, Megan, look!” And then Megan says, “What?” And the first one whispers, “I think there’s some guy in that stall!” I look down, at the football cleats that I’m still wearing, which must be clearly visible to the other people in the room. And I make a quick judgement that if I try to wait them out, one of these two will likely try to get others to come and watch the stall until I come out. And that could include people that want to laugh me or that want to whoop my ass for being a pervert guy in a girls bathroom.

So I say screw it, and I very quickly wipe clean and bolt for the door. I don’t even look over at the two, who immediately let out cackling laughter and something to tell me what I already know, that I’m in the wrong place. No time to acknowledge it, I get to the door and shove it forward and feel a loud thud. As the door opens, I catch a glimpse of some old lady that was in the way of the door as it was opening up onto her backside. In my defense, I didn’t actually see her fall on her ass. It was implied, based on the amount laughter I heard as I turned the corner of the building and ran around the back side. I re-joined my team and didn’t take my helmet off the rest of the game, hoping to conceal my identity. It didn’t occur to me until later that I was one of two black kids on the team and that anyone on our team who heard this story would be able to figure this out pretty quickly. But whatever.

So look, I’m just trying to illustrate what I’m sure you already knew: you really should pay attention. It can be a hassle to, to keep all of your thoughts organized in a way that you keep the priorities straight. Sometimes you’re just too tired of thinking, and something slips your mind, I totally get it. But it’s still hard to argue that in retrospect in many situations. It’s hard to make someone understand why you forgot you left the coffee on top of the car before you drove off. People are rarely sympathetic that you came to work wearing two different socks inside two different shoes. You’re probably going to get teased by your friends if you show up wearing a Hawaiian shirt to a wedding reception in Detroit. When you drop the ball on remembering what you were doing or picking up on a crucial cue, it always comes back to the same concept: how did you not notice this? What was on your mind just now?

Which is a fair question for many of us. Many of us have so much going through our head that we let some details fly under the radar. Not even because we were doing something else, like texting something or going through some list we wrote out. Sometimes, you are so deep in thought or in a memory and you focus on it, you keep it in tunnel vision while still unconsciously moving through another part of your day. I find it’s rather easy to get wrapped up in your own head, trying to do too much at once or feeling like you don’t have enough time to get through everything that you want to.

So what am I trying to say here? That you should stop and think about the things things to avoid making mistakes? That’s a stupid thing for me to tell anyone. I’ve had some great adventures occur because I was distracted or mistaken or surprised by something. I’ve had wrong turns that became epic journeys. I’ve had projects that became colossal failures, and then amazing clarity that came from those failures. In fact, one of the things that has made me who I am today is the sheer fact that I am okay with making mistakes here and there, just to spice things up. It is a risky way to live full time, but the occasional gamble with ‘seeing how this goes’? Is it so bad to let life throw some lemons at you?

So of course, you should pay attention. But there is an inherent cost, and actual price for paying attention. And that price may vary, depending on what you are or are not paying attention to. If you’re driving, and not paying attention to the road, you might just be risking taking a wrong turn. That could mean that you’re late to something, but also that you find a new route to where you were going and you discover a bar or a new restaurant that you get to introduce your friends and family to, and it’s awesome that it happened. Not paying attention when driving could also mean that you get sideswiped by an 18 wheeler and careen into oncoming traffic, and you crash and wind up as a quadriplegic, and it’s less awesome than the restaurant would have been. Like I said, the price varies. Sometimes you really should focus.

But other times, it's really not so bad.

I was in Florida for my last semester of college. I ran track and field for my school, and we took a trip to Gainesville, where the University of Florida is located. Seeing as I had never been to the campus before, I decided to go exploring on my own for a bit. So I take a leisurely walk down one of their main streets on campus, that had all these interesting stores and restaurants. I was just trying to get a feel for the place as a whole, while checking my phone for fun stuff to do in the area, and I pass by what looks like a random book store. I can see book shelves, and there’s a display with some music and a bunch of randomness. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the store, and I decide I’ll just stop in and see what this place has.

Upon walking in, something immediately feels off about this place. For one, there is a dog just kind of wandering around the store. It’s a German Shepherd, and a pretty big one. It doesn’t bark at me or anything, but it walks right up to me and jumps up on me for a moment, which i don’t mind so much, because I love dogs, but it seemed like something you might not want in a place of business. And while the dog is jumping up on me, I glance over at the clerk behind the counter, and he’s this overweight dude in plain clothes who is sitting at the front desk, trying really hard to ignore me and what the dog is doing. So that seemed a bit weird too, but again, I’m taking in things as they come, I can get past it.

So I start looking at some of the music, and I don’t recognize a single group. It looked like I had started looking at the punk rock portion of music, because some of the band names were stuff referencing attacks, and rebellion, and darkness, and all of this rough sounding reference to the names. And I start to look at some of the track names, and it’s pretty offensive sounding song titles too. And I still can’t find any groups I know. And that’s a bit weird, because I had been into rock music for several years now, and while I didn’t know all the groups that I should, I knew a lot of them by this point. But even then, nothing seems to actually be cause for concern, and I move on to some of the books.

And this is where it got more direct. The books were all of a certain attitude as well. Most of them referred to violence and secession and rebellion and Jews and illegal immigration and anti-government and… wait, did that one talk about Jews? Upon review, I realize there are several books that, in the title, refer to the Jewish faith in a pretty offensive way. And then there’s one about immigration that actually has the racial slur, ‘spic’ right there on the cover.

So that’s not okay, I say to myself.

I look back over to the clerk, who is still focused down at his laptop in front of him, but I see him look up barely to check on me, then look back down. And I take another look around, and I realize that I may have wandered into an ‘alternative’ bookstore. And that’s about when two dudes walk in, with shaved heads, cut off t shirts, frayed jeans, nose rings, and one of them had a sizable confederate flag tattooed on his shoulder. Which, even that isn’t so surprising in the deep south. But it furthered the inference that maybe this wasn’t the best place for me to be wandering around alone without any witnesses.

So the two guys see me, and their eyes get wide, you know, like they’re shocked to see me where we are. And they look to the clerk, who meets their gaze, and gives them a shrug, as if to say, “I don’t know what he’s doing here.” And they all look back at me, and I give them the tight lipped nod, to say, “Yes, I did make a mistake. I realize it now. I should probably go.” And I start to walk for the door, unsure if I will be allowed to leave now. And one of the two dudes that came in, he doesn’t immediately move out of the way, because he seems to want to reinforce the look of, “We would actually prefer if you didn’t come back here,” and I give him the look like, “Dude, I don’t want to be here anymore than you want me here, I stumbled in here trying to be spontaneous and obviously didn’t notice the signs right away.” “So then he moves over, and makes this gesture with his arms like, “Well, there’s the door, you fucking idiot.” And I make a similar gesture with one arm, “I know I’m a fucking idiot, I’m really just glad to leave here without being stabbed by Jasper and Jebediah here.” We had a whole mini-conversation with gestures and sounds, without saying a thing to one another, but the important parts still got through, I think.

Anyway, with that said, I basically ran out the door and a block down the street. I don’t know if they were going to change their mind and follow me or what, and I didn’t want to chance it. So I hopped into a random restaurant, hoping it wasn’t a racist restaurant because wouldn’t that be my luck at this point, but it wasn’t, it was a Mexican restaurant that served alligator tacos. Yeah, totally a thing. So I tried them. And I’ll admit, kind of an overrated experience, it tasted like any fish tacos I’ve ever had, but I like fish tacos and so it worked out. And I relaxed and had a much better experience with the second random place that I stopped by in Gainesville.

It would turn out later that the store had a few signs outside detailing this guy’s constitutional rights to own the kind of store he wants to and can sell what he wants. And it wasn’t a huge sign or anything, but it was there in the front window. So it was definitely my bad. And it could have ended worse, obviously. Then again, having someone murdered or kidnapped from an alternative bookstore is probably bad press, and it would have probably led to bigger problems for them if I disappeared, so I might not have been in any actual danger all along.

Now, this entire little situation could have been prevented by paying a little more attention. I risked a severe ass beating, or worse. But then I wouldn’t have this story to tell, I wouldn’t have ran into the restaurant and subsequently ordered alligator tacos (it’s very possible that they weren’t actually made with alligator), and I’m sure the book store owner wouldn’t have his own account of my visit on his personal xenophobic blog. It might have worked out best for everyone. And I learned firsthand that places like this do still exist, and that these kind of ideals are much more bold in other parts of the country than they are where I live. I experienced something that I probably never would have agreed to beforehand, but that undoubtedly changed my perspective forever. That’s the price of Paying Attention. You never know what stories you don’t get to tell now.

The Offensive Linemen In Your Office

The customer is not always right. In fact, in my experience, customers are wrong until proven right.

Most of the time, the customer is the one asking questions. And they are usually right to ask questions because they don't KNOW very much about what they ask about. Of course, I'm generalizing, but stay with me here. I've worked in several different types of customer service jobs, and they all taught me the immutable truth: People that want things suck. As in they drain. They drain time, energy, resources, souls, ect. And plenty of times, it’s not their fault, not always. They don't have to be dumb people, they don't have to be organized or in large groups, they don't really even have to ask for the thing they want. But people in need of something tend to drain one thing or another from those trying to help. I'm positive I am the same every time I show up somewhere as a consumer. And it’s not going to change anytime soon.

Customer service is the art of a few different crucial skills. The art of compartmentalizing your own needs to put someone else before you. The art of listening and responding appropriately. It is the art of knowing your business well enough to be able to help and serve. But see, there's more to it than that. In many instances, customer service is the art of getting yelled at, either subtly or overtly, and standing together. Customer service is the art of knowing what to expect, because of assholes that want to ambush you to make themselves feel better. It's having the knowledge of every possible thing that can go wrong, every conceivable way that the product or service that you offer can fail because, frankly, you've dealt with them all. It’s the art of knowing what people want to hear, what they need to hear, and what they’re supposed to hear.

Based on my experience, customer service is like the offensive line of  the business world. I mean, you never hear about customer service for good reasons. No one comments on customer service like, "Oh that company was great! I called them and they sent me the exact part I wanted and I was so impressed." Or, "Oh my goodness, they sent me the wrong part. But then they made up for it and I was so happy with them, they really stepped up to the plate!" Bullshit. You comment on customer service if it sucks, and if it doesn't, you barely notice. You barely remember it even took place. It’s expected. I learned a while ago that bad news travels 4 times as fast as good news. All the time you hear about people that were screwed over that want their revenge. They want retribution, and they’ll preach on the pulpit how craptastic your thing is. Far fewer people want to preach about a good experience that they wish to share.

Thus is the similarity between the offensive line and customer service. For you football fans, I want you to think of 5 prolific quarterbacks without having to look them up anywhere. Just think of their names, real quick. Got it? Okay, now list 5 great running backs. Done. Good, now list 5 of the best left tackles you know.

Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Having trouble? That’s okay, list me 5 linebackers. Now list 5 pass rushers on the defensive line, any position. Now 5 all-pro offensive linemen, any position. Still tough, isn’t it? See what I mean? You don’t remember these guys despite the fact that they’re the ones in the trenches. They are the ones who get beat up on every single play. You can have an amazing offensive line and an average running back, and you will have much more success than an amazing running back with an average line to protect him. Same thing with business. If your business has an average to shitty product, but you have people there to support it and apologize for you, you will stick around a lot longer than if you have a great product but no one to support it when there are problems or questions.

If your business has enough money to have customer service, they basically have the ability to set up a human buffer zone for themselves. A human spit guard. When you have this department, what you're basically able to do is wait for someone to come and have a problem, and you call over to this guy, you say, "Hey Larry, come here for a moment. Just stand right here, right here between me and our customer here. He's gonna yell for a while and I want you to tell me what he says, but you do it because I already have his money and I don't actually give a shit. So it's your job to give a shit. So just stand here."

So Larry gets yelled at and comes back and is like, "Yeah, the customer wants a better product for less money, he wants it today or tomorrow, he wants you to deliver it on a silver platter and he would love to punch you in your face after he gets exactly what he wants." 

And then you say, "Ok, so this is what I want you to communicate to him. I already have his money, I make the product I want to make and he is welcome to purchase or not purchase that product. I make it at the pace I choose, I deliver it in the way that's best to me, and I would snap his neck if he wanted to throw down. Go ahead and tell him that, see what he says." 

Larry says all that, and the customer yells some more, and says, "The customer says screw you and he wants a refund and he's going to tell everyone not to buy your product and that you have a microscopic penis."

So you say to Larry, "Okay, Larry, are you writing all this down, tell him this. Tell him that I’m laughing at him from my office, and that I wiped my ass with the money that he gave us for our product just to do it. And that he's a slimy, inbred, worthless shit bucket who was too dumb to live without us and our product. You can paraphrase all that if you need to." 

Poor Larry would probably come back like, "I need to put in my two weeks notice. I just don't think that I can keep doing this."

And then you, being the boss, you come back at him like, "Ok, Larry, what you're going to need to do is go into the bathroom, and look yourself in the mirror, and you're going to tell yourself that you are a degenerate and you have no life and that without this job you would be on the street. And that you can't quit and you'll be here for-fuckin- ever and your life is basically ruined. And do it quickly because when you come back, I'm gonna have you say some more shit to this customer."

I work in a customer service job right now, and it’s mostly over the phone. And honestly, in spite of my complaints, I know that my job could be a lot worse than it is. I know that I'm getting by just fine for now and that I have a lot to be thankful for. The main reason I am reminded of this is because of my memories from previous jobs.

Like my former job, working at a rental car location. It doesn’t matter which one, because I’m guessing working at another rental company would be pretty similar. Understand, this newer job I currently have, it’s all on the phone. It’s a call center, with people calling from all across the country and Canada. It can be very interesting, never knowing where someone was going to call or email from. But I can always put them on hold, I can leave the desk where the phone is if I need to. On the side of renting cars, people were calling from local areas, and then coming to see me in person. This was not optimal for me. At all.

I have learned from the days I worked there, that customer service roles done in person are not for the scatterbrained, the flippant, the panickers, the eccentric, the uninformed, the nonchalant, the independent thinking, or the hungover. I wasn't all of those at any one point (to my knowledge) but I'm sure I was each of those at one point or another when I was renting and servicing cars. The office that I ran was located right down the street from my apartment at the time, near downtown Madison, WI. So it was convenient to get there and to get home afterwards. And at the same time, it was always close, it was always there as a reminder of all the shit there always seemed to be left to get done.

I took over the location as the sole agent there, but I had an experienced guy with me for the first week or two, to get the hang of what was going to occur. And for the most part, it was a smooth couple of weeks, and I was comfortable and felt confident for when it was just me, flying solo. So obviously, my first day alone at the job consisted of several events that had not occurred to us during my training, including this dude that paid by check, having to turn away customers due to credit checks, running out of cars, having to leave to gas up cars with people there waiting, stuff like that. And then there was one particular customer, whose name I have adjusted for this story: Taylor Redd.

Taylor had rented a car two days prior. She had returned the car while my training supervisor and I were working there. Basically, she or someone in her family smoked in the car. A lot. To where it smelled a lot like any other car that's been smoked in. We also found a lot of ash underneath the seat. Both I and my supervisor saw it, we both asked Taylor if anyone had been smoking in the car, and she denied it both times. Now me, I wanted to bring her out to the car and ask her, and show her what we were looking at. My supervisor just said, 'Okay, go ahead and leave.' And that was that, at least as far as what he had to do. I took pictures, we wrote up the report, and arranged to charge her the additional fees, roughly about $250. Sucks, but that's what you get, right? Case closed, yeah?

Nah.

One of the first calls I got from my first morning alone just happened to be from Capital One, and it was in regards to a customer who had been overcharged for a car rental and had her credit pushed over the limit as a result. The name rang familiar the second it was said over the phone. I tried to explain to the Capital One woman what was going on and why it was occurring and that there was nothing I could do to change the charges. She calmly responded that Ms. Redd would be in later to discuss the charges with me in person. Wonderful, I remember thinking to myself.

So that day, amid all the other shit going on, I took my lunch break at the restaurant next door and tried to uncoil. It had been a stressful enough morning, and I actually had forgotten that I should be expecting Taylor’'s arrival. But as I walked back to the office after lunch, an interesting thing happened. I passed by some of the cars parked in front of the office, and someone stepped out from between two cars and behind me for a few seconds before darting back between two other cars. He was a younger looking black dude, had a pick stuck in his hair, had baggy shorts and a blue t-shirt, and was walking really goofy and gangly. That's seriously the best way to describe his walk. It was creepy and strange, and yet the guy looked so goofy that I remember laughing about it in my head at the time.

So I open the office back up, and in comes Taylor and 3 relatives, and they line up at my front desk, in what can only be described as an assault formation. As a formality, basically pretending I didn't remember what was going on, I turned to one of Taylor's relatives and asked, politely and as aloof as possible, "What can I do for you all?"

Taylor Redd's exact response: "You can give me back the money that you mother fuckers stole off my credit card."

I mean, she laid into me in a way that I had not previously known. She went all in, then went back-to-back. It was ugly. And while Taylor was going, the lady next to her was trying as hard as possible to keep it reasonable, trying to provide actual arguments and logic for why the money should be returned. Next to her was the same goofy kid that had followed me in the parking lot, who was laughing at all of this and really must have just tagged along because he wanted to see what was going to happen. I wasn't so much worried about any of them. I was more concerned about the 4th member of the group, who was standing off behind Taylor, with a deranged look on his face, not saying anything but just standing perfectly still, arms folded, with his bulging upper body barely covered by his wife beater shirt. That was the guy I was really worried about, because I've never seen anyone who was later convicted of premeditated murder, but I saw this guy’s face. He looked like he was meditating about murder.

Anyway, my boss ended up coming by and basically giving them whatever they wanted, which meant that we had wasted everyone’s time by trying to enforce the rule that was very clearly broken. Awesome. I take the brunt of this for hours on end and it basically was all for nothing. And this is what I’m talking about. The idea of blocking shit from someone just so that when they finally get past me, the person behind me just gives up the ball, so to speak. I would have liked to think that if I held out that long repeating the policy that was dictated to me, that the person above me would at least pretend that it was for an actual cause. I posted up and blocked for as long as I did and basically the quarterback that I blocked for just panicked and threw across his body into the zone of … you know what, it’s not even like that. The QB I blocked for ran into another lineman’s ass and fumbled the ball. Or handing it to a linebacker rather than get tackled, something like that. And that customer, and all the other customers that got to witness all of that, will more than likely remember nothing more than that our location had poor blocking.

When blocking is good, you remember the running back or the receiver or the quarterback. When the blocking is bad, you remember the blocking.

You're Going To Be Fine

I read this entry online that claimed that there are some very successful people who hadn't gotten anything done by the age of 30. It was meant to reassure people reading the article, like myself, who hadn't really gotten too much done at the time they were reading the article and were looking for a way to not feel that bad about it. I suppose it worked on me, to an extent. I mean, I'm not 30 yet, but it is getting noticeably closer and I do constantly get the feeling that I should have gotten something done before now, or should have a plan for what I'm looking to do if I haven't actually done it. This work here, this pile of thoughts and theories that I am still hacking away at, perhaps this is what I am ultimately supposed to be doing. Or maybe not, and it is yet another distraction that will lead me, unknowingly, onto something else, and I'm supposed to be doing THAT thing instead.

Maybe I'm not supposed to do anything. I have of course considered it.

Let's say I'm not supposed to do or be anything great. Let's say I don't do something very good OR something horrible, and I just kind of drift along in this same way, feeling exactly like this, for the rest of my life... is it really all that bad?

Oh, it's tough to settle in life. I know it's tough to purely give up or to watch yourself get complacent and make real peace with it, and there are constant reminders that I've known others that have risen up past the level that I would be labeling as what I am content with. But I can also admit, there are people I remember, people I grew up with, that are way worse off now than they were back in the day that I knew them. Or people that I didn’t even know, that I still would really not want to trade places with.

This one guy in particular, I never even remembered his name. But I ran into him at the bar in my hometown a few times, this same bar on a Saturday night. The bar was called 'Flips'. Our group liked it because the bar was easy to get to, it was right off the highway. And it was away from what was considered downtown, for our small and nondescript town anyway. Which meant there was less likelihood of running into random people we used to know in high school, people we didn’t care to run into now. And it was just a good, straight forward, no gimmicks just decent bar, it was all we asked for in our early 20's. Our group of friends liked to do interesting and insane things on certain nights, and go to bars with crazy specials and amazing bands playing, but sometimes we liked to be near home and just go somewhere simple and almost boring for a breather.

That and they didn't always card.

Anyway, by this point in my life, I was of age and didn't really have anything to worry about on that front. I was able to be irresponsible in a legal basis, which wasn't quite as fun but was showing its perks. I was at the point in my life and in college where I thought that I had actually learned some things and could talk as such. Every twenty-one year old in a bar thinks they finally have something to talk about, why wouldn't I?

Anyway, like I said, I never got the name of this guy that I met at Flips, but I still remember his face. He had these reddish eyes, these scars across his cheek on one side, this scruffy but still somehow managed beard. He wasn't that tall, but had a large heavyset type build. But like the type that could very well have been some muscle in the recent past years and just packed some flab over it. Or maybe he was even then still muscular, it can be deceptive for some people. But the point is, it looked like the guy had seen better days. He was a bit older and seemed just run down. In fact, I seem to remember he usually showed up wearing a headband. What kind of dude wears a headband to a bar?

But either way, the guy was not too much of a schmuck if you talked to him. Which I did once. I was there with a good friend, Kyle, and we had neared the end of several rounds and were about to call it a night. And this guy overheard something we say or we respond to something we heard and we strike up a conversation. He was just a dude, just some chill guy who was also drunk on a Wednesday night like we were. We talked about sports, and a bit about the music that was playing. And it wasn’t anything weird.

But I did notice him start to mention things consciously. He mentioned he drove a Benz, much like the Benz I was driving of my dad’s that night. He mentioned he ran track at Grapevine High School, like I did. I mean, he did it like 5 times, stuff that was not in conversation and in a weird way. And Kyle noticed too. And we didn’t mention any of the similarities when they came up, but we both said later that it felt like he was trying to elicit a reaction from us. Like he knew that they were similarities somehow. It was eerie. And the eeriness was further compounded by the fact that the next few times I went to that bar, he was always there.

Now, on one hand, this could all be a coincidence, and not really that sketchy in general. Or this dude could have been a stalker or a con artist or just some weird guy in a bar doing weird wild shit. He could have been trying to set up a gay hook up with me, I don’t know. There would be nothing wrong with that if I was also gay and it didn’t come off as completely surreptitious. And that’s the point I’m making here. I grew up in that town, I knew people that either didn’t leave or left and their lives crashed and burned, and it could always be worse. I mean, I went through a rough period post-graduating college, where I couldn't get a real job and didn’t have any money or anything going on, but shit, I could be the guy at the bar trying to strike up random conversations with strangers to establish or feign things in common. I could legitimately be THAT guy. And I’m not.

Could be worse.

So I just thought I’d throw that out there, for some of you that see these facebook feeds full of your friends and family doing all these epic things. People are finishing up their Doctorates, moving to different countries, buying luxury houses around their luxury cars and that have access to park their yachts, people are even building luxury cars in some cases. If you’re seeing lawyers and doctors and film directors and hedge fund managers and Congressmen and astronauts (no, I haven’t got any friends trying to be astronauts...that I’m aware of), if you see all of these things that others are doing and you aren’t doing these things too, just remember a few things. You aren’t in jail. You aren’t paralyzed. Hopefully, you aren’t in so much debt that you’ll never get out of it. Most of you have some kind skill, something that can be further developed and used as a focal point of your future and your career. Some of you are attractive enough that you have a significant other or might one day find someone willing to put up with you. No one’s saying your life is perfect. But you’re alive. And you’re not just finished, you’re not destitute. You’re not making grilled cheese sandwiches over an open flame in an abandoned lot somewhere. You’re going to be fine. Just keep being, living, doing you.

I do wonder what that guy at Flips is doing to this day. I haven’t been back in years, he could still be there. He could be living in a van down by the river. He could be dead. He could also be preparing a corporate takeover of some software start-up and getting ready to buy his 3rd villa house somewhere exotic because he has money like that now.

Just do you. You’re going to be fine.

O'Hare Airport Ain't Big Enough For The Two Of Us

In the heat of the moment, a lot of us tend to make a bigger deal out of some situations than we should. And by that, I mean basically everyone makes a bigger deal out of basically everything that they deal with. It’s absurd how into ourselves we are today. The shit we need to put on Facebook to get people to give us some likes. And snapchat and Instagram and Twitter and MySpace (do people still use Myspace?). We take pictures of ourselves doing things, or then doing nothing but sitting in front of a mirror looking at ourselves and making that stupid duck face. We post videos of us doing dumb things, intermixed with other people we’ve never met also doing dumb things. Right now, you’re reading the inner ramblings of another person who’s literally writing this because he wants to. And thank you for that by the way, but it furthers this particular point. Everything is not as crucial as we probably build it up into our own mind.

Why do we put things on this level? Is it that we just want to believe that we are that important? Are we all just becoming narcissists that have to be constantly paid attention to, that have to chronicle our every move and thought to play to the masses like our own individual Truman show?

Yeah, pretty much.

It’s not so bad sometimes, either. It means we never have to feel out of touch with anyone that we care about (or don’t care about, for that matter). We can constantly be entertained, by just surfing the annals of social media until we find something that one of our acquaintances did, said, or reposted that piques our interest. It’s cheaper than cable and stranger than fiction. There’s always something weird that you can find out there if you look hard enough, and that makes it easier to always find the thing that you want to see or hear next. Which, in turn, gets you used to seeing and hearing what you want to see and hear, so you may grow dependent on just that. Not just the fact that you can literally seek out stuff that justifies the things that you already thought. I mean the concept that you are just that important, where stuff should be readily and constantly available to you, no matter what or when or where or how.

And look, I know I’m not exempt from this. It’s one of the burdens of technology. We start living our lives faster and we stop remembering how to do stuff. I always think of phones. We used to have to remember people’s phone numbers. Now, the only numbers I really remember are from my childhood because that’s when I had to know who to dial and I dialed so often. I used to be so excited to get home from school or from classes at college to go and play computer games. Now I play games constantly and think nothing about it. Remember when you used to have to carry around CD’s that you wanted to hear? Or tapes? Or you had to know how play music yourself?! Now you just plug in your earbuds, or you just say screw it and press play anyway. Let everyone in the room jam out with you, who cares? It’s all right there at your fingertips. You don’t have to wait. So why not get used to that?

This takes me back to my college days for a few reasons. The mid 2000’s is when social media really started to take off as a ubiquitous part of everyone’s life. It was when Facebook and Twitter really started to come alive, and when YouTube went from a site that you visit to a thing that you did. We use YouTube as a verb now, but it used to be right there with a few other ways to search for something, like Ebaum’s world. Remember Ebaum’s world? Me too. Kind of.

Anyway, between technology becoming cheaper and wifi becoming a more thing that every place had or should have, it was actually a good time to be a college student. I was probably in my third year of undergrad at UW-Madison. And I’m fairly certain I was flying home from Thanksgiving in Texas back up to Madison, which means like many other times, I had to go through Chicago O’Hare airport. I hate O’Hare airport. For the simple fact that O’Hare makes everything more complicated. I’ve flown through this airport as a connection and which 2 exceptions, every god damn time I go there I get delayed. Doesn’t matter what time of day, where I’m going, or what season and weather, it never seems to fail that I do not get where I’m trying to go on time. I actually get surprised the times that I get out of O’Hare and my plans have not been ruined.

I’ve had times where I was running through the terminal like one of the Home Alone movies. Missed my flight every time. I’ve had times where the weather had them cancel my flights and the airline bought me a bus ticket instead. On the way back from my recruiting visit to UW, I got stuck in the airport for 13 hours going through 5 different flights on the standby list. But the time that sticks out in my mind the most about the perils of O’Hare airport is the time that I almost got into it with this old Asian lady about a power outlet.

So on this particular evening in Chicago, I was still waiting for my next flight that I could jump onto for a standby. Because I was late getting in from Dallas and my flight left without me. Like I expected. I called it from so far in advance, I didn’t even bother doing my homework because I knew I’d have time in the airport. So that’s what I did. I had some history research and I had to give my analysis of a historic speech, and it was actually not that hard but it was going to take a long time so I had to make sure that I could sit in a spot and focus a good amount of time all at once to at least knock out one of these assignments. So I get of the plane and I walk to terminal I will eventually be flying out of, and I look for a peaceful place to get my work done. No such luck. My flight was not the only one that was late getting in, there was a shitload of people waiting for standby seats all over the place. The announcing speakers were constantly talking over each other about which passenger’s were up next and which gates were now switching and what times departures were now being pushed back. The weather was not even that bad overall, but it was crappy other places and the terminal was jam packed with people.

So the hallways with outlets and desks on carpeted floors that were usually quieter and not as heavy with foot traffic? Gridlocked, not just with occupants, but with people hovering, waiting for someone to leave so that they could claim the next spot. So were the food courts, so were the chairs outside of most of the gates, it was absurd. It was like we were all waiting for concert tickets, but no one knew where the office was going to open up. I had been walking for twenty minutes, trying to find anywhere that I could just set up shop and get to work, and I finally found a spot on the tile floor around the corner from my eventual gate. It was going to be a few hours, so I used my jacket as a pseudo cushion and set my laptop and notes up.

After a few minutes, this other guy came by and asked if he could use the other side of the outlet, which I obviously said he could. He was a nice enough guy, about my age, from New Jersey. And he’s got his stuff he’s trying to get done, and I’m working on my stuff, and everything is good. And that’s the end of the story, right?

I’m afraid not.

Ten minutes into me and Jersey Boy working on our stuff without interruption (I knew his name at one point, but I forgot it and it doesn’t matter), an elderly looking Asian woman walks up to me slowly. She has this long, purple jacket on, and she has a cute but unsure kind of smile, and she’s holding a laptop. I’m not even sure she is coming up to me until she taps me on the shoulder. I had my earbuds in, so I remove them to hear her out.

“Um, excuse me?” She managed somehow. “Can you spare the power to share?” Don’t ask me how I remember that particular phrase, I just remember that’s what she said. And it sounded like this might be the extent of the English that she knows. I try to explain that I need the power and that I’m working on something and that she has to find another outlet in this case. I glance over at the other guy, who’s just staring back at her, probably hoping he doesn’t have to give a similar justification. She doesn’t look at him, she stares at me, like eventually I’ll change my mind. And when I say she stared at me, I mean like two straight minutes, just staring with this uneasy grin. Almost like she was processing what I must have said. And then all at once, it turns to disgust. Like I flipped a switch in her somehow. And yes, it might have been when I got sick of staring back at her uncomfortably and put my earbuds back in. But come on, two minutes is a lot of time to stare at someone 3 feet away and have them obviously waiting for you to give in to their demands.

She walks away, and I look over at the NJ guy again, and we exchange this look like, “What was I supposed to do?” But I look back over at her as she’s walking off in a huff, and I notice that on her screen is a still shot of a movie. I don’t know for sure, but I feel like it was actually a scene from ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. And that almost pissed me off for a second. The nerve of this asshole, trying to get me off of my outlet that I had to scavenge for so she can watch one of the many medical dramas out there. I may have moved over for Scrubs, mind you, but not for Meredith Grey. I have my principles.

Anyway, we go back to our work. And that lasts about 5 minutes. And I’m just now getting into the groove of the work I’m doing, like it’s just getting productive, and I get this feeling that I’m being watched. I can’t explain why, but I just get this weird inkling. But I try to shake it off as I continue my speech analysis. But then I get the feeling again, and for some reason, I look up, and I see the Asian lady in the Purple coat walking slowly with another Asian lady, and they’re both glaring at me as they pass by. They are locking eyes with me as they move down the corridor towards the mini bookstore. I was a bit taken back by it, because I had almost forgotten that she existed, and now she’s back, and she has backup. But again, no big deal.

And then a few minutes later, I look up and she’s walking back across the walkway in front of us the other way, and there’s another lady, this one REALLY old with them. This woman had a cane, but she was more intent on locking eyes with me than on making sure that she was walking carefully enough to protect her one good hip. And then they all got smoothies, and came back and just kind of camped out right across from us. All giving stink eyes right at me as they sipped their Orange Julius’s through straws.

Now of course the Jersey guy noticed this too, and he looked over and said something to the affect of, “Dude, did you do something to piss off the Asian mafia?” And I said that I wasn’t sure anymore, and I told him that I’m pretty sure that the first lady was watching Grey’s Anatomy, and he laughed at that. “You and I might get our asses whipped over Ellen Pompeo?” And I say, “Yeah, this might get ugly.” So he says he’ll back me up if it really comes to a head or anything, which he hopes it won’t because this would be a really stupid thing to fight anyone over, under any circumstance. I tell him that I agree, and that we will hopefully be able to reason with them if they really can’t let this outlet thing go. And we stare back over at them for another minute or two.

And then we hear, “All passengers for flight 3477 to San Francisco can now begin boarding now. We are now boarding all rows, all passengers.” And one of the ladies whispers something to the main Asian lady in the purple, and they all just kind of snap out of it, and they hop up and leave. And that was the end of it.

I mean, this would have gone down as one of the dumbest things to fight about, period. A power outlet in a crowded airport full of outlets if you look hard enough. At least I assume that’s what happened. I may have disrespected her and not realized it somehow, or she may have not liked black people, it is possible. Maybe she was just overcome by the power of this particular episode and really needed to know what happened next. But all of these come back to the point that whatever she desired at that moment was obviously very important to her, as was it important to me to get my own stuff done rather than just get out of the way to not provoke someone who clearly needed to finish binge watching a season on a laptop. This was such a stupid thing that was a huge deal at the time, apparently. Seriously, who even gives a shit in retrospect?

Furthermore, why do we complain about traveling through airports? What happens after we wait for a while? Oh that’s right, we get into metal contraptions and fly through the sky! And it’s way faster and it’s really not that much more of a hassle than driving or taking a bus would be, and many times it’s less of an overhaul hassle, and we still complain constantly. Louis CK pointed this out too. “New York La Guardia to LAX in 6 hours. That used to take 30 years! And a bunch of you would die along the way, and people would put your hat on a stick where they buried you and keep walking. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got to California! Now you watch an Adam Sandler movie, take a big runny dump, and you’re there.” It wasn’t a 30 year trip, but otherwise, yeah, I have to agree. We’ve gotten used to complaining. And we’re probably not stopping any time soon.

I’m still probably never going to San Francisco again, when I think about it. I don’t need to run into that woman, especially if she doesn’t like how Grey’s Anatomy has turned out these past few years. Except she may not have actually been from San Francisco… Maybe I’ll avoid California for a while.

You know what? Screw her. I’ll go where I want. I hope I see her next time I go through O’Hare. Bring it on. I can handle the stink eye from old Asian ladies. I hope she has her whole family with her next time. Seriously, screw her.

And screw Grey’s Anatomy. Just because.

Caution, Wet Floor

I had this coworker a while back. We’ll call him Zee. Zee was interesting in a few different ways. I mean, this guy was just a hodgepodge of bad habits and sharing the wrong bits of information. He shared the details of he and his wife's Valentine's day. Or maybe it was the anniversary, either way it was a bit much to hear behind the counter during a work shift. He would go back and forth from trying to be everyone's friend and share a ton of his projects like his prog metal band or his sketch comedy group, and then would get overly serious and act like he owned the branch. It was weird being around him for a full shift.

He would tell you about how creative he was and all the things he wanted to do. And he would tell you how sure he was of his vision, and how creative he was, and how funny some of his ideas were. And then he would tell you a joke and it would be awful. Or better yet, it'd be a joke you'd heard before but he'd tell it wrong.

Like this one he tried this one time, I remember, his joke was , "What's the difference between Jews and pizzas?" Pause. "Jews don't scream when you pull them out of the oven. No, wait." He knew that he had screwed it up, but it actually made an otherwise bit of unnecessary racism actually funny to me. I was like, Jesus, what kind of pizzas do you have at your house? Like, what if that was normal, like you're sitting at your house and you just hear a random shriek from the kitchen, and the first thought in your mind is, “Hey, y’all makin’ pizza tonight?!”

Sometimes things are only funny because you had to be there.

There’s a phrase that hangs around a lot of jokes that people tell. The phrase is, “You just had to be there.” There are a lot of versions to this phrase, but they all amount to the same basic principle: This is an inside joke, that has context that you will not understand unless you know the people, place, or things involved. They are jokes that basically no one will find funny other than a select few people that know or experienced something specific.

Then again, inside jokes are kind of what all jokes are, when you think about it, because you have to know some kind of context for really anything to be funny. Context is the key. Whether you’re making fun of something or you’re referencing something ironically or you’re just being goofy, most of the time it’s only funny if you know what is being referenced. If I show you Abbott and Costello’s bit, “Who’s on first?” and you don’t know anything about baseball or what names people usually have, the joke doesn’t make much sense, does it? You have to understand the setting of what something is supposed to be before you can go into why something is different.

A pie and a face? Not inherently funny. A pie in the face? It’s funny to some people, kinda played out to others. Same with someone getting punched in the face. Some things just work with certain people, which may very well turn back to our own experiences, I don’t know. Obviously there’s no formula for figuring out what’s funny to which people, what stuff we should all find funny, blah blah blah. But as much as we laugh at things because they were going the way the joke is supposed to go, sometimes we laugh even harder at things that are going the wrong way. Yes, sometimes failures and screw ups are just as funny, or even funnier than the intended thing was supposed to be.

Things that you witness are usually pretty hard to explain why they were hilarious if you don’t have a way to fully relate what was going on or who was involved. Even a picture or a video rarely does the situation actual justice.

I’ll tell you a story now.

I was out with some friends of mine in college, and we went to this Mexican restaurant on the edge of campus that didn’t card. We went there because we were all underage, or only one of us had an ID, I forget how it worked. But we went there and drank, and we were too young to do it legally. The place was known for it’s margaritas. It was also known for serving underagers those margaritas. Believe it or not, the place is no longer in business. Before you ask, no, it was because they were busted for serving underage drinkers. They actually had huge shootout that happened there, too. Or whatever, I just know they closed years ago, that’s not the point.

I had just met these new friends, and was just getting to know them as they were getting to know me. But I was the new one in a group that had been around each other for a few years, and I was constantly caught off guard by them. For one, they were all Packer fans. I had come from Texas to college and was still a Cowboys fan. I didn’t know all the same people as they did, I didn’t watch all the same shows, I was in different types of classes, stuff like that. In fact, I remember being somewhat intimidated by these friends I had just made. They were all really smart and really passionate about what they were studying in school. Mitch and Dylan were studying engineering, Breah was a year ahead in Business school, Luca was building racing car motors, and Karen was into Veterinary science. Me, I was between majors at the time. I ran track and field at our school and I worked with Dylan at football games up in the club seats, but not much else was solid in my future plans. So yeah, that’s what I had to talk about.

But there was one thing I discovered at this Mexican restaurant that I could definitely do with these kids: drink.

We started in on those margaritas and we just did not let up. I think we got them in pitchers rather than individual drinks, and we basically each had our own pitcher by the end of it. And this was on a weeknight, I very clearly remember this coming on a night that I still had homework to get done before class the next day, this was not ideal. But it all just escalated quickly. It went from, “No, I’m not drinking” to “Well, I’ll have one if you guys are just having one” to “One or two more won’t hurt anything” to “Where the hell is our table? Do we still have our table?” These drinks were not playing around, I can remember that much. Their kung-fu was strong. There may have been some tequila shots too, not sure.

Anyway, we get up to leave. And we were, to put it mildly, 'feeling it'. It was sometime around November or December, because it was the first snow of the season, but it was this nasty rain slush that was coming down. Tough to walk in, tough on the eyes and face, it was windy too, so this just sucked to be out in. So what we did is cut through a building on the first block out that was on our way home, which allowed us to be inside for at least a little longer. This building had an art gallery that was actually open at the time, so naturally there were these classy types having a nice little cocktail mixer, enjoying fine art. And in comes 5 noisy drunken undergrads, talking shit about each painting like we know what era and techniques each of them entail. I’m not sure if we tried to stay and order drinks or not, I just remember that we were essentially ushered out of the building, as politely as possible. Or we just kept walking and didn’t try to stop, either scenario is equally likely. But this detour was notable for one other reason. I may have borrowed something on my way out.

When we left the building and began walking again in the slush again, a young couple was walking across the sidewalk, in front of us. I held up the yellow fold-up sign I had taken from the building that read “Caution: Wet Floor.” I announced the words of this to the couple, who turned around, surprised. Then, as politely as I think anyone ever could have been, they just waved and said, “Oh, thank you,” as if this was a revelation to them. Well, the rest of the group saw this and thought this was a ridiculous and completely unnecessary. And so we decided to keep doing it to everyone else on the way home. Basically, every passing person or group of people and every car got the same announcement of a wet floor. And with one exception, everyone was really nice about it, and said thank you. There was one couple that did look at us like we were nuts, which was probably the funniest part of all of it. But even passing cars just had people wave and laugh at us.

Why was this funny to me? Well, perhaps it was the fact that literally no one needed us to know that the ground was wet, and it was a goofy way of trying to feel better about crappy weather. Maybe it was the idea that I was hanging out with these brilliant kids, and yet they were all acting just as dumb as I was at the moment, and that years later I still talk with some of them about nights just like this. And again, maybe we were just really, really drunk. But this is one of my best memories from college and it came from something that probably makes no sense and isn’t funny if I tell you what happened with no context.

Guess you had to be there for it.