So here's the thing: at work, my job is to help people. This is fine and great, and I really like doing it. Hey, here's a suggestion for how to find a hospital location, here's the paperwork you need to shoot with a gun, here's how you can burn stuff to a CD. All good.
Lately, though, I've had some insane campers at work. Campers are people who sit in the Student Production Office all day and talk to me. Now some of these campers are cute and charming and boys and that is totally totally okay by me and in fact great. But some of them are skeevy boys who think because they are talking to me and I am not leaving and they know my name from my nameplate thing that we are friends. Hey, I can't leave because I'm AT WORK. That's like thinking the garbarge man has a crush on you because he keeps coming by, every week. They make me think I should burn some Ani Difranco songs onto the computer at work so I can play them on repeat until they leave. Maybe I need to try the DJ Doretta technique of clearing the floor of the Pit (University of British Columbia pub as classy as it sounds) of nineteen-year-old mackdaddys at the end of the night by playing Liz Phair's "Flower" and Tori Amos' "Me And A Gun". Under no circumstances should I play any Weezer. That just fans the flames. However "Eternal Flame" over and over again might do the trick.
Two super-clingy women have been camping out on my shift in the last few weeks. One of them is, you know, unstable, and wears a pert little white suit with a pert little white hat to match and makes desperate-sounding phone calls to get jobs and gets mad at people on the other end of the line and lectures them and then tries to catch my eye and tells me how sad she is while her eyes roll all around the room and won't let me exit the conversation and then she cries. This is for the entirety of my five-hour shift. I feel guilty for not wanting to help her and then feel annoyed at her and then feel guilty again for being annoyed. The other clingy woman needs help finding the keyboard. I'm close to not kidding. She needs explicit and repeated instructions for filling out forms, faxing, printing, and scanning which she then ignores so that you have to pay undivided attention to her while she does it again. She also narrates her attempts to do things which might need your attention, "oh no, this pen doesn't work... and this pen doesn't work either!" Yesterday she asked me which bin was garbage and which was recycling. That would be the blue bin with the arrows pointing in a triangle that says "Recycling" on the side.
The hardest work I do at work is stay calm and patient with these people. My socialist upbringing helps.
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4 comments:
I found that playing Le Tigre would clear everyone out at the Pit.
This technique did not work for beer gardens though. I had a small beer garden following, including an eighteen-year-old boy who wanted me to ICQ him to talk about the greatness of Z-Trip. Wow, remember ICQ?
Hmm, how about Jay Chou's Still Fantasy? You can play the sappy ballads until people want to claw your eyes out.
Was that the "only black indie rocker in Vancouver"?
No. But your memory is like Jeremy's.
Which is to say, a steel trap.
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