May « 2005 « Black Marks on Wood Pulp / by Corey Vilhauer

My worst boss

May 9th, 2005

Everyone’s had one. They either hover around you, like mosquitoes looking for stagnant water, forcing you to concentrate more on them than your work, or they do nothing at all, holding the entire responsibility of your business’ success over your head while they take the credit.

I’ve had a few. I worked for one in a bowling alley in Marshall – my first college job. I dealt with someone who was a little too needy, a little too confused, at an Erberts and Gerbert’s sub shop in St. Cloud. I acted as a clerk while a married couple (who also doubled as my bosses) became more and more suspicious of every employee at the craft and hobby store and eventually separated from each other.

But there’s one who was the worst.

This is the story of Chad Madison. The worst boss I’ve ever had.

In Sioux Falls, where I was still spending my college summers, I had quit my cushy job at Best Buy in order to take an even cushier job at Software Etc., a video game store at the Empire Mall, South Dakota’s biggest mall. By the next year I was pretty sure I’d just stay in St. Cloud instead of moving back home every summer, so I asked for a transfer to the St. Cloud FuncoLand, a company that had just been purchased by the Babbages/Software Etc. conglomerate.

After a few weeks of employment at FuncoLand, which was a dingy, dirty waste of retail space, I had made some great friends. Surprisingly, we were a pretty successful store. We were a smart group of employees and we knew our video games. We made sure that when customers made the effort to come in, usually with the knowledge that they were paying an extra five dollars for an “expert” opinion, that we weren’t disappointing them. We all had great chemistry – Mitch (the assistant manager,) John (a key holder, like myself), and later Doug. Nothing could break us. We were co-workers, but we were also comrades.

For some reason, the beginning of the end seemed very fuzzy to me, I guess in part because I never realized how close to the end we were.

I had been at the St. Cloud store for about four months when our current manager, John Bigelow, announced to us that he was resigning from his position and taking a more lucrative offer at Toys R Us. “Biggs” was not the personable manager, but he knew how to take care of his store. He had been relatively successful in training new managers in the company’s Manager In Training (MIT) program and was proud of his job and his store. He was a lifetime retail manager; his mind flooded with supervisory notes and techniques, and he was looking forward to a new challenge.

Still, he was dull, and a pain in the butt, so we eagerly awaited our new manager. This manager had gone through the MIT program with “Biggs” and was moving to St. Cloud to take over. His name was Chad. And we were all trouble.

Comments: 15

Issues Considered: Annoyances, Career

Nostalgia

May 7th, 2005

One thing I notice a lot about myself is my tendency to reminisce about… well… anything. In fact, it happens all the time. It’s quite common for me to suddenly spring backwards in time with nostalgia, bringing even the most mundane thing back to the forefront of my memory.

I’ve become nostalgic over simple things, like playing a wrestling video game or slamming a single beer while challenging my roommates at Trivial Pursuit, but it’s been equally as common with major things, like my travel destinations and general times of joy. Lately I’ll become nostalgic and consider the subject to be fit for “print” on the blog, but when I try to get the thoughts out I’ll find it hard to get the details right, to make the feeling the same to everyone who reads it.

There’s something about nostalgia that is difficult to convey in print. It’s a feeling of remembrance (that’s easy enough) but there are always details that are intangible, that one remembers unconsciously, that are nearly impossible to get out with any fluid motion. It’s a wave of memories, feelings, places, climate, smells, sights, and sounds that create an entire picture.

Nostalgia is more than just a memory of a certain time: if a memory can be seen as a single snapshot, I imagine nostalgia to be more like a multimedia affair, like a ten-year anniversary double-disk DVD re-release of your favorite movie. There are hundreds of “easter eggs” on each nostalgia trip, both of things that are easily forgotten and things that are revisited often.

I do tend to wonder, though – with all of this thought of my past swelling up within my head at the tender young age of 26, is it even possible to imagine what I’ll be like at 56 – or even older; when I’ve reached the age at which I can glance back at my past and have something a little more lengthy to consider?

Scents

May 6th, 2005

The smell of the rain, for whatever reason, always reminds me of spring break 2001 – Seattle. There’s something about the way each drop crashes to the pavement, kicking up the dirt and sending an earthy smell into the air, that takes me back four years – to when Kerrie and I jumped onto a plane and headed for our first venture into the great Northwest.

It was a sudden decision; we had both found that tickets for Italy were very cheap – a little more than 200 dollars – but that once over there we wouldn’t have any money to spend. Neither of us had ever traveled anywhere for spring break, and decided that it was high time that we left the confines of central Minnesota. We contemplated a few different cities, but our heart was always set on going to Seattle.

The stereotype is true: it rains in Seattle a lot. It was never a horrible downpour, like New Orleans, for instance, but four of our six days were met with a light rain, almost a mist, that would spring a mixed smell into the air – rain and ocean, dirt and concrete.

Aside from the obvious remembrance of places and things, I find myself reminiscing about any trip I’ve taken by the smell in the air. I’ll catch a whiff of bus exhaust, or the searing smell of rush hour traffic, and instantly be reminded of walking around in London, dodging busses and traffic while gawking at the Tower of London.

The smell of Cajun spices brings to mind New Orleans, obviously, but so does the smell of garbage – more specifically, the smell of wet garbage. Wood burning in a fireplace takes me back to Jackson Hole, where I spent my summers until I was too old to spend summers with my grandparents any more. Rain? Well, Seattle.

Our Seattle trip was ultimately uneventful, but thrilling to us all the same. We learned the downtown area as quickly as we could; we spent hours at Pike’s Place Market, we played pool and cribbage until I could finally win, we drank and planned a future we knew would happen eventually.

Regardless of everything we did, though, just a spattering of rain can bring it all back.

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: On..., Travel

Rocker; swear words.

May 4th, 2005

Just a quick post today, since I’m going to work early and making cookies.

You read that right. Shut up.

I discovered this at Other Men’s Flowers, a blog that primarily deals with smart-sounding words and subjects. There is a proliferation of curse words, so be warned, but it’s hilarious…and so true for those of us who find ourselves leaning a little more left than the norm. No wonder “liberal” has become a swear word.

Fuck the South

———–

In a sports vein, I found this story about former Atlanta Braves pitcher and current bigot John Rocker. Apparently, he’s trying to make a comeback.

Well, after giving up two hits, two walks and two runs in one-third of an inning on the mound for the Long Island Ducks in a 2-1 loss, Rocker got into a confrontation with a fan. From SI.com:

As Rocker left the field, Dave Macken of Atlantic City, a Surf fan sitting near the visitors dugout, yelled, “It’s a long way from Atlanta.”

According to Macken, Rocker replied, “I’m still a millionaire and you’re a piece of [expletive].” Macken told The Press of Atlantic City that the two then exchanged vulgarities.

Rocker recalled the exchange differently. “Call me what you want, but don’t start cussing at me like that,” Rocker said. “That’s just wrong.”

This is the guy who became the most hated man in sports when he bashed any minority group you could think of in a 1999 interview for Sports Illustrated.

He’s certainly not doing much to fix his image, I’d say.

Lend me a hand..er..finger?

May 3rd, 2005

Is it possible anymore to eat any type of food without fear of a severed appendage waiting inside, suspended like a turd in a swimming pool? Is that just too much to ask?

According to CNN.com, a man who ordered some frozen custard was surprised to find a severed finger inside. The finger, which was lost by an employee in an accident, was discovered Sunday in a pint of Kohl’s Frozen Chocolate Custard. When officials went to investigate, the owner confirmed that an employee had lost the finger in a food-processing machine accident.

First of all, if you know your employee has just lost a finger, and you can’t find the finger anywhere, wouldn’t the most prudent thing to do involve recalling and searching the containers of custard in which the finger fell? Wouldn’t a respectable business owner know that if they couldn’t find the finger in the factory, someone else would find it when they sat down for “family ice cream night?”

I’m sure I would have made that a high priority, to say the least.

The funny part, though, is how the finger was discovered. Here’s now Clarence Stowers describes it (CNN.com):

“I thought it was candy because they put candy in your ice cream … to make it a treat. So I said, ‘OK, well, I’ll just put it in my mouth and get the ice cream off of it and see what it is.” Stowers said he spit the object out, but still couldn’t identify it. So he went to his kitchen, rinsed it off with water – and “just started screaming.”

No doubt.

This all comes in the wake of the recent Wendy’s fiasco, where a Las Vegas woman claimed to have found a finger in her chili, only to be discovered later as a complete fraud. She had tried to sue, but when the negative publicity came out, she decided to drop the claim because, according to attorney Jeffrey Janoff, “it’s been difficult for her emotionally.”

The woman, Anna Ayala, is claiming that Wendy’s is hiding something, and that she is not dropping the suit because she could be found guilty of fraud. Instead, she is questioning why she is being “victimized again and again.” Wendy’s says that the finger was not cooked, and did not enter the chili through its ingredients. DNA tests are still pending.

While searching around the internet for more clarity on these subjects, I found two interesting things. One is a funny parody on Islamica News about a Halal butcher who lost his finger and just let it go. The second is a media tip sheet from the Farm Sanctuary that brings together facts on laborer deaths and injuries in factory farming. There are numerous facts and figures regarding the hazards of factory farming and agriculture, but the craziest piece is a list of documented accidents and deaths as reported by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Be warned, the list is gruesome: Scroll down, it’s at the bottom of this link.

That’s enough to make me very thankful of my cushy cubicle job. I’ll just sit behind my computer with no fear of finding a severed finger under the keyboard, or a toe behind the monitor.

Or will I?

Comments: 3

Issues Considered: Linkage

My Very Own Polysyllabic Spree: April 2005

May 1st, 2005

I guess this would be considered the beginning of my grand experiment. Last month, fueled by reading sections of Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree, I challenged myself to start reading again. This, in turn, spurred my new routine of returning from work, grabbing a beer (just one, thank you) and lounging in our upstairs dormer until 2:30 am. Then I’d go to bed.

Wow. I amazed myself by reading six books this month, one of which was very long. And while six may not seem like a lot, I’d like to tell you that I haven’t read six entire books in the past six months. I thought I didn’t have time to read anymore but, by cutting out useless activities like gluing myself to a Playstation 2 controller and watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force, I found myself with plenty of time. It’s not about too little time; it’s about poor planning.

My monthly “column” is directly aped from Nick Hornby’s format, I think. I haven’t actually read the book in its entirety yet because I want to still feel a little creativity in the idea. Still, his concept was to first outline the books he bought/borrowed, and then talk about the books he actually read. I’m going to follow that. Thank you, Mr. Hornby. I hope this admittance helps stave away any copyright fees.

Now, enough with the introduction – on to the books.

April 2005

Books bought/borrowed:
Elements of Style: William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White
Little Children: Tom Perrotta
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations: Clive Ponting
The Best American Essays 1991: Joyce Carol Oates (editor), Robert Atwan (senior editor)
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim: David Sedaris (borrowed)

Books read:
Feet on the Street: Roy Blount Jr.
The Final Solution: Michael Chabon
Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Lynne Truss
The Name of the Rose: Umberto Eco
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim: David Sedaris
Time’s Magpie: Myla Goldberg

Short books ruled my mind this month, with four of the six being under 200 pages. The same percentage was non-fiction, though not the same four books. Technically, also, I had read most of Feet on the Street in March, but since I finished it in April, I’m counting it. I was afraid that I wouldn’t have had much to write about if I didn’t include it, but as you can see, my reading output was more than expected.

Both Roy Blount Jr. and Myla Goldberg are featured in the Crown Journeys series of travel literature. The series overall is a collection of short “walks” through a specific area – the locations range from Rome to Yellowstone National Park – and reflect the voices of literary figures that are not usually associated with travel novellas.

I’ll admit, the travel novel is a secret love of mine. I’ve always said that one of my hobbies is traveling, but since I can’t afford to travel distantly, except for once every two years, this leaves nothing of my hobby but reading travel books. I routinely live vicariously through Bill Bryson (the author that got the “travel literature” ball rolling for me) and Paul Theroux (the author that I read when I want to feel smart.) I feel that travel literature can be further divided down into small sub-sub categories, depending on how each author approaches his or her work: humor, historical, sociological. Good writers mix all three of them.

Blount, who is more renowned for his short stints on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (the NPR News quiz,) presents the story of New Orleans through his own history. While living in the Crescent City off and on for most of his life, Blount has mixed together various experiences and people in an attempt to understand the culture of the city itself. Each chapter, while dealing with a different subject, tries to find the exact feeling that embodies all of New Orleans. Wetness, oysters, desire, food; each individual section uses a classic New Orleans symbol to describe a particular part of the city’s life.

While written from a humorous point of view, it seems as if Blount spent a good majority of his time feeling uncomfortable with the city, as if he was afraid to really let us know what happened in his life. It’s a rambling narrative, moving from one place to another with little to no connection between any previous chapters. Much like New Orleans itself, it offers unpredictability and lagniappe, a Louisianan word for “a little extra.” Each chapter ends with details on various point of interest within, a little extra bit before you pass the subject by and continue on.

When comparing the two Crown Journeys books, I found that Feet on the Street has more in common with Time’s Magpie than just being part of the same series. Both books are written with complete truthfulness, unafraid of showing the warts of each city. Blount made sure that the debauchery of New Orleans seeped through the pages of his book, just as Goldberg makes no pains in hiding the past destruction, poverty, and corruption of Prague. In fact, Goldberg narrates almost exclusively on the negative points of Prague’s history as if trying to show how a city so great could be built on a history of depression.

Prague is a city that has been through its share of bad times and bad leadership, creating a mix of styles and histories that clash together like stripes and plaid. Much of the government is new, and its social system is still fresh in many minds: it’s been only 15 years or so since they’ve bucked communism. Floods have ravaged parts of the city, other parts have been run down by poverty, and their police system seems to be more of a boys club than a viable civic service.

Still, Goldberg writes in a way that brings beauty to an ancient troubled town. Comments on how she was fined by crooked cops for accidentally walking into a “no pedestrian” zone are book ended by descriptions of Prague’s National Library, with it’s monstrous card catalog (an antiquity in today’s computer age,) and the city’s iconic Charles Bridge. Goldberg relates readers with the suffering of a city under communism by taking them, fittingly enough, to the city’s Museum of Communism. The picture she paints of Prague – a beautiful city with a dark bordered history – makes the use of my Prague travel guide unnecessary. I’d really like to visit now, regardless of how rundown some parts of Prague may be.

It wasn’t all travel books this month, though. I ventured into the realm of “good grammar” with Lynn Truss’ Eats Shoots and Leaves, the “Runaway #1 British Bestseller.” How a book on punctuation makes the bestseller list at all I’ll never know, but it was a little less surprising when I cracked it open and began reading. The book is named after a silly pun, which goes:

In a bar, a panda eats a sandwich, fires a gun in the air and walks towards the door. When the waiter asks in confusion what he thinks he’s doing, the panda throws him a badly punctuated book on wildlife: “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves”.

Truss compares good and bad punctuation with a dry wit, making her point while at the same time creating an atmosphere of fun. A common theme is how computers and laziness are slowly killing punctuation, leaving us with the type of paragraphs we usually see on internet message boards; devoid of sentence structure and punctuation, many of these messages read like telegrams – PLEASE SEND HELP STOP IM DROWNING AND I NEED A LIFEJACKET STOP.

Some critics, I’ve found, are a little harsh on the book, but I think it’s very clever, and if anything, Truss may have hit a nerve with some critics – those who don’t want to admit that grammar and language is a living, breathing entity. There may be some mistakes in the book. There are with any book that gets published. But this book is written as a call to arms for those who are tired of the simple mistakes, such as the incorrect possessive apostrophes and unnecessary commas that throw themselves into business signs and movie titles. This is not a book to learn punctuation by, but it is a book to enjoy and relate to. Truss just needs to rant, and this is her vehicle. It’s exactly what you want a book to be: entertaining.

Trying to veer away from the technical books, I checked out the newest David Sedaris book and took a stab at Michael Chabon’s newest mystery story. With Sedaris and Chabon I always get a feeling of reading “the next big thing.” Both authors are always incredibly trendy and consistently at the tops of every critic’s list. Chabon’s The Final Solution, a fiction story based in England around World War I, brings to mind Sherlock Holmes, while Dress Your Family in Courderoy and Denim is a collection of essays about Sedaris’ struggling dysfunctional family; the one he has forged his name upon in the past five years.

Chabon has a great gift in creating characters. His The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, a novel about a pair of kids who start a successful comic book line, quickly became one of my favorite books. I see many similarities between the character of Joe Kavalier, illustrator and cousin of Sam Clay in The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, and Linus Steinman, the boy with a mysterious parrot in The Final Solution – both are haunting, young, Jewish and mysterious, and both are holding secrets that could be dangerous…if they were ever revealed. The difference is that where Kavalier is bold and brash, Steadman is the exact opposite: a mute with deep piercing eyes that broods over everything but his parrot.

The Final Solution reads like a tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle. An 88-year-old former detective plays the part of Holmes, bringing himself out of retirement in an effort to solve the mystery of Steadman and his parrot. The parrot spews out a series of random numbers, always in German, and this serves as a focal point for a heinous crime. Everyone wants to know what these numbers are; is it a social security number, bank account, or telephone number?

Sedaris, on the other hand, doesn’t need to create characters. He’s been growing up with them for his entire life. His parents and siblings take up most of the space in this book with hilarious and embarrassing essays on each member’s problems. Amazingly, though, Sedaris takes his family’s shortcomings and uses them to reflect on his own insecurities and problems. A story about how his sister is too messy turns into an inward looking script on letting things go, while an essay about a beach house winds up discussing dashed dreams and disappointment.

Because of this, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim seems the most real to me of all Sedaris’ books. Each essay takes on a little bit of his own life, from childhood to adult, and tackles his personal problems, like dealing with homophobia and dysfunctional living, with a refreshing humorous approach. It’s almost as if I was reading pure humor and suddenly he sprung his morals in my face right at the end.

Finally, this month I am most proud of reading (and finishing) Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is, without sounding too alliterative, his murder mystery with medieval monks. This may have been the most difficult book I’ve ever read, and though I’d like to avoid sounding like a complete slacker, I found myself skimming many parts of the book. I don’t mean skipping parts, but skimming – reading every word, but not comprehending what each was saying.

Part of the difficulty was how Eco writes. His books are originally written in Italian, and an English translation fails to match up with the original, forcing the translator to leave a fair number of Italian and, in this book, Latin words and phrases in the text. Since Eco writes as if each sentence is being meticulously sculpted, rather than written, and also since I know neither Italian nor Latin, I would end up searching for meaning in the context, never really being sure I was catching the whole thing.

Still, it was an excellent story: Two monks travel to a distant abbey in Italy for a political meeting with the Pope’s representatives to discuss the validity of poverty vs. charity. On arriving, though, the monks find that a series of murders is just beginning – each murder being linked to the abbey’s library. The library, which is in fact a labyrinth, contains the largest collection of medieval literature in the world and is a beacon to all who seek knowledge at the time, bringing to mind the secret Vatican library that was described in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons.

Aside from the long rambling discussions on poverty vs. charity and faith vs. logic, the main theme seems to lead to the thirst of knowledge and those who try to keep it hidden. It would be impossible to summarize the book – there is just too much going on – but Eco himself mentions that “the first 100 pages are difficult” (duh) and that it is “a mystery where very little is discovered and the detective is defeated.” While this is not all true, it is still a good way of looking at a book that is as complex and educated as The Name of the Rose.

So, with one month behind me, I conclude the Spree… for this month at least.

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: Books, Literature, What I've Been Reading