Everything about today was stupid and unnecessary.
It began in the lobby of a high rise.
I waited for the doorwoman to finish her conversation with a maintenance woman.
"Good morning," I said.
The doorwoman seemed annoyed with me.
I explained that I was picking up three small items from one of the tenants, and gave her the name.
"Do you have an apartment number?"
I didn't.
"I need an apartment number."
I gave her the name of the tenant and the floor she lived on.
"Do you have the tenant's name?"
I told her the tenant's name, and pointed out that it was the third time I had said her name.
The doorwoman now had the daunting task of looking up a name in the directory on her desk.
She contacted the contact and rushed through a flurry of instructions for me, pointing behind me.
When I walked away from her, she raised her voice.
"WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"
I was extremely fatigued, and hungover. Again.
The glorious show last night in Milwaukee was now just a figment of my imagination in the reality of the service industry.
My fuse was about a millimeter.
"WHERE DO YOU WANT ME TO GO? YOU POINTED OVER HERE."
She told me she had pointed at the sign in sheet, which I needed to sign, and then indicated another direction for the elevator.
Livid, I signed the sheet like an asshole teenager, making sure to scribble hard and take up 3 lines, writing well off of the margin and onto the desk. I hate when I do shit like this, but I suppose it's better than hurling a potted tree at the worthless doorwoman's shitty face, which is what I felt like doing.
When I got to the 36th floor, the tenant was passive aggressively kind to me. She quickly handed me two long photography C-stands, about four feet long, and a shoulder case. These were not "small" items as indicated on the order. She commanded me to "have a nice day" with a false lilt in her voice.
The rest of the day followed in a similar way.
The woman at Calumet Photo spoke to me curtly and without politeness when I didn't know the exact information about the C-stands.
At the post office in Westchester, the woman behind the counter beckoned me by calling me "miss." She asked how I was.
"I'm fine, how are you?"
She responded by staring at me with cold, suspicious eyes. For the rest of the transaction she decided to be impatient with me.
I decided to be annoyed when the people at The Laborers Pension referred to me twice as a "new driver." I've been doing this fucking garbage for ten years.
And that's when it hit me.
I've been doing this shit for ten years. Getting into the same petty situations over and over again.
And while there may be some entertainment value in my inability to play the game of fitting into society, there needs to be some sort of character development in me.
Otherwise, this will become Curb Your Enthusiasm.
People may like it, but after a while you know what's going to happen in the first paragraph.
So I have to find my arc.
I'm trying, but I give up too easily.
When I say "good morning" or "how are you?" in an attempt to initiate good relations at the top, I can't turn on people immediately if they don't respond accordingly.
In other words, I have to lower my expectations of the human race.
So I went to a junkyard.
Then I had to teach.
My mind wasn't working very well.
It stuttered.
One of the students joked that next week I'm going to try teaching sober.
I didn't have a comeback.
That sucks.
Verdict: Loss
No comments:
Post a Comment