Making a flying death defying leap at one of life’s rolling donuts, I hit the ground running at 8:50 am. I’m running late for the social event of the century. The official compulsory Guitar Sys Inc. Saturday Morning Group Analysis Seminar.
We don’t call them meetings, because they are so much more than that. According to Chapter 11 paragraph two of our Advanced Employee Handbook they are "exercises in self criticism and self-education objectified through numerical performance analysis."
In other words, who’s selling the most?
If I’m lucky and neither get there late (then you’re locked out until the meeting’s over, and you have to accept a formal write-up for "tardiness, poor attitude and lack of productivity"), nor die of the exhaustion that caused me to sleep through the Cicada Alarm Clock again ("my God, I hope that stabbing pain in my chest is just a muscle spasm!"), I’m due for my routine Saturday combination of chaos and consumerism at its finest. Dante, eat your heart out.
It is a Honeysuckle laden five blocks I sprint through the foggy stench of the eructations of the Astoria Sewage Treatment Plant that’s a mile down wind. Despite the flowers in full bloom, this morning, I keep thinking of beans.
I’m at the deadly juncture of Abilene and 69th before it even occurs to me that I forgot to pick up my coffee a couple of blocks ago at Fabulous Do-Nut D-Lite. A squalid brightly lit hole that delivers neither delight nor fabulousness, unless you’re really shit faced. But I need caffeine.
There’s always Diet Coke at the machine. Two of those babies could set yer granny’s corpse a-twitching.
And for added value, it’s terrific for stripping those pesky old dried bloodstains in those tough to reach corners of the family kitchen. I sprint into the intersection.
The screech of brakes and the shriek of a panic stricken horn disturbs my reveries. I am looking at a BMW headlight about five feet from my left kneecap. I give a friendly smile with a wave of thanks to a typhoon of Spanish blessings, I suppose. The middle aged Latino screeches around me, his chunky wife still with her hands on horror stricken jowls.
So now I am already teetering in the middle of the four lanes of Abilene Blvd., affectionately known as "The Highway of Death."
Only there do I get the knife of fear. Not that I almost got myself killed in squalid manner, or that this would mark my pitiful executioner for life. But terror of living with an injury, now there’s a real jellifier for that knee of yours.
All of that notwithstanding, it’s looking like everything’s going my way. I’m not late, and must be a couple of minutes early. I see three of my comrades in customer servitude leaning against the entrance to the two story brick façade.
These shadowy figures: Slouching into the cigarettes they suck like drying teats, cheeks collapsing into the jaws that hold no doubt junk food induced decaying teeth. With eyes pleading from pit like sockets circled with an accordion’s worth of bags, these young men, most barely out of their teens, look up at me enviously: perched between making it to work on time and imminent death. Oh lucky bastard that I am! Almost didn’t make it.
I’m across the other two lanes in ten seconds, finessing a Mercedes Benz truck doing a mere 49 mph. Nothing to it. Routine. All you have to do is remember to duck under the rear view mirror.
The Saturday fog is lifting. I straighten my back, finger comb my hair, and stride toward my huddled spectral comrades in competition.
The first and only skull to croak "Good Morning" is that of one of the store’s elders, Joe Alfonso. (Yes that’s right, of the notorious Alfonso family. Neck had been a hinge of acquaintanceship that we both never acknowledged.)
The other two, were in their very early twenties, had only been working for about a month so they had the stunned look of freshly battered puppies. I had not even bothered to learn the names on their Systems Associates’ tags, yet. Only ten per cent of new hires even make it for a month, unless the store is desperately understaffed.
Joe was your classic Genuine Heavy Metal Drum Monster. Five feet tall and four and a half feet around. He had world class skills in that arena, and exploited none of his "family connections." So he was exhibit A in the Court of Offers You Can’t Refuse refused.
When Joe sat behind a drum set, it didn’t even seem like the kit was being played. It suddenly burst into life. It was as if the kit became a cascade of every cymbal and drum sound in the palette being executed with super-human velocity and supra-human accuracy. Out of the chaos, he never failed at making sense.
Although I would not go so far as to say Joe was unspeakably ugly, he was 8 parts frog to two parts prince. However, like Norman, he had no discernable neck and came off as a monstrous mushroom squatting human toad.
His head perched on his shoulders like a bowling ball. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, quite unlike the usual Sales Associate’s heat seeking serpentine slits. He had a five o’clock shadow by 9a.m. no matter when he shaved.
He kept his thick, pitch black, three foot mane of hare in a greased pony tail as a concession to looking "corporate." Unfortunately, all this accomplished was to expose the back of his neck, which was so generously follicled, that if he ever went bald from chemotherapy, he could do a comb over beginning with his back that could reach his eyebrows.
As far as protective coverings go, he was Moby Dick dropped off for two weeks in the Sahara.
Black jeans, rumpled and unwashed , hung on for dear life under the luggage sized fold of gut he affectionately referred to as his "Italian Food Storage Bin." Whatever collared shirt he wore above looked like Salvation Army material by noon. In heated conversations sometimes his Italian Food Storage Bin seemed to jut out between pants and shirt like an angry, defiant fist.
Often at such moments his morning shower wore off with spectacular aromatic results.
He maintained the department with a combination of hands on slave and slave driver that was unquestionably from the "old school" of retail. He knew his warehouse like a thirteen year old knows his dick. Any devoted manager who was a devotee of clean fingernail corporate Zen management found him disgusting. He was a doomed man, knew it, and hung on for dear life.
The trick being not to make it worth it for Guitar Sys Inc to terminate you. The trouble being that it always seemed to be in GSI interest to terminate any employee who began to accumulate benefits.
Personally I liked him the best. He was store Drum Matrician. That’s what Guitar Sys Inc calls Department, or Matrix, managers.
"Another Saturday in the place where they can’t even get Hell right, Weasel."
"Nope. If it were hell, we’d at least have the brutalized dignity of Angels fallen, knowingly sating themselves with garbage. We are the garbage."
"Well, we’re only active garbage as long as we’re in the rankers list."
The minute your numbers drop, they start finding all sorts of shit wrong with you."
"See you in the meeting. Hope you make it on."
"Same here, amigo. It ain’t been an easy month."
"They’ll be getting rid of one of us by the end of the month unless we’re both on."
"Like flipping coins in hell."
"NO. It ain’t Hell amigo. It ain’t all that good. It’s only Fucking Heck. Read Dilbert."
The Reading of the top 10 store rankers is the crowning achievement of the hour spent reviewing all promotional materials and raking over the coals anyone who has failed to memorize the radio ad copy. But before any of that, there are the inevitable preliminaries.
There is a sudden blast on the store PA.
"ALL SALES ASSOCIATES TO THE PRO AUDIO MATRIX."
We are endlessly reminded that Guitar Sys Inc is more than "just guitars." As a retail juggernaut whose core motto reads TWD, short for Total World Domination, one might expect some spit and polish Luftwaffen Sales Force to phalanx forth into the Pro Audio "Matrix."
The shuffling, straggling, twenty something wretches that gather around the silent amplifier stacks and displays in the Guitar Matrix look more like a better grade of concentration camp inmates. Hollow eyed with partial memories of the drinking that left them hung over, prematurely pot-bellied and bent almost double, as if bearing a lifetime’s worth of unrealized dreams, they amble into the Pro Audio Matrix like dazed Alzheimer victims.
I could almost feel pity for anyone who is clutching their coffee cup two handed with the trembling hands of doddering ninety year old, were it not that I can expect them to ruthlessly snake sales from me at their earliest convenience, all the while talking about how cool it is too be so young and work here with wierd old "Pops" Weasel.
Some of the more skillful of them, like Joe Islovi, bear faces radiating a malignant, rodential intelligence. When his wiry five foot body festooned with fashionable tribal tattoos slithers in, the room lights up.
This is not due to any mystical sort of radiance or educational accomplishment on his part at all, it is simply because he has been #1 on the Sales Rankers for the last three weeks.
He is one of the Pro Audio Matricians.
Perhaps Claude Levi-Strauss speculates wisely when he suggests that urban humanity has classifiable sets and subsets of human sub-species. Viewing our early 21 Century environment as a media driven greenhouse, we might observe certain flowers which thrive in the hothouse that would fail in the wild.
Joe would last about two days in a boot camp, but his poseur abilities let him write some amazing first impression checks.
For example, although he displays marginal musical abilities, when I first heard to him play a guitar for about thirty seconds in the course of a six thousand dollar amplifier sale, I was very impressed.
At twenty three, Joe was sharp enough to know he would never take the trouble to be a true musician, so he carefully "chose his battles" on the instrument. He played a seven string guitar that he had pre tuned so that one could make about thirty seconds worth of sounds. Enough to demonstrate the instrument’s utility along with the impression of his mastery of it, as well as the technology he was selling.
Another two minutes would prove the "Johnny one note" content, but by then Joe has packed up the circus and is closing the sale. Another satisfied customer leaves the building.
The mega store is divided into Matrices, not Departments in order to "educate both staff and customer of the interactive web substrate that supports each transaction. Every transaction is regarded as a brick which we will mortar into a complete home musical ecosystem. "
Each item that the successful sales associate can add to the "Sales Ecosphere" is a point towards "Planetizing" the customer. Every manager is given a Global Sales Goal (GSG) upon which his/her bonus is based. This goal is about triple what the store will really do in business, and about double its capacity to execute with the "integrity," which the Matrix Guidelines Handbook employs 57 times in twenty pages.
The manager, Jeff Jacobin, opens the meeting with an "icebreaker" about what a "terrific place GSI really is. He’s giddy from being freshly arrived from another one of the Matrix Manager Redefinition Retreats. That’s GSI speak for a week in Cali getting hammered and improving your golf swing.
He says something that begins with,
"While we were out there we got so drunk we just drove out with the Golf Cart. I mean we’re talking about the greatest place to work in the Universe, man. And that can be you, too."
Jeff is about thirty-one, but still prides himself on his athletic build, easy toothy smile, and boyish good looks. He has a lot to be proud of. The bottom of his face is a perfectly symmetrical oval that tapers like an NFL pigskin.
The chin’s cleft is set like an onyx-dead center on his chin. At its broadest diameter he has a pair of doe-like brown eyes that peer from beveled cheekbones, and appear to hang like magic below neatly plucked thick brown eyebrows, slightly raised.
It is a face he keeps slightly upturned towards the fluorescent lights. A face without a shadow on it. He pays $100 every ten business days for a #4 buzz cut that anybody else can get for ten, including generous gratuity. A shining bulb in the GSI box.
Jeff does not smoke and will immediately orate in nasal tones for hours anyone who gets him on the subject of how he successfully quit the habit. At approximately six feet tall he is built like a college quarterback gone slightly to fat. It is a muscular but clunky physique. He blames that on quitting.
He has the sweeping body language of someone who may have had a lot of experience selling California Real Estate. His right hand is extended to shake yours before it even appears to move.
However, Jacobin saves his best handshake for any employee, when he stops over to "congratulate you. I’m promoting you to the most important job in the company. Customer." He always had the final check in his other hand.
"So look I want you each to realize that there’s a place for every one of you in that Golf Cart."
Enter the peanut gallery from the stirring throng of about twenty five.
"Would that be instead of the fourteen year old with you in the photograph here, Jeff?"
Joe Islovi is also in the "Fast Socket" for management. He’s holding up a shot from the "Redefiniton Scrapbook " that Jacobin had been passing around. This and many other manager antics had been duly recorded. Jacobin gives him a brother-in-arms chuckle, slacks his jaw open like an innocent frog, and "Joe, she was definitely at least eighteen. Her ID said nineteen, and so what if a woman still finds lollypops and pigtails a fashion statement? Don‘t you?"
Jeff’s philanderings among the Braces Brigade was legendary before he even arrived from the West Coast. Why a man like that for manager? Either nobody knows, or nobody‘s saying. Before I worked in sales I worked the door (The Penultimate sphincter in the great consumerist digestive process of all things wood, plastic and silicone. The ultimate, being the garbage dumpsters of somewhere in the not very distant geological future.), and it was quite a workplace spectacle. Some of the gum chewing whiny eleven year olds looked like they needed a good bath and bedtime story more than anything Jeff might have for them in his legendary "Back Office."
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit of impediment" was something I used to comment on this horror at the door. Other employees glanced at me with the gaping eyes of those who assume I am insane and non sequitur.
Eyes that have been light years away from Shakespeare. He’s going into the sales ranking list and I’m starting to doze off. I start thinking about The Bard and how I’m certainly not anything like that, and then fall into reveries of just last Saturday….
I am working the floor on a Saturday, and flashing on the following month’s rent with every transaction. A heavy but pretty middle aged woman pushing forty comes in and asks about a repair order on a Velazzi Schlemuli Guitar.
Ankle deep in the paper strewn wreckage of five hours worth of transactions behind the counter, I feel my sphincters tighten in instinctive sympathy with the frustrated purse of her lips.
I am familiar with the brand, and know it is what we call a "junk" brand, as well as the proprietary brand of one of our respected and noble competitors. I consider the possibility that there can be nothing worse than a repair order on junk that goes wrong.
I am huddled at the counter with Gary, my Guitar manager and sales jackal supreme, when she starts in with:
"I think it was one of you who took the order. I know its overdue, and I don’t have the receipt, but I was wondering if I could pick it up today. "
I guess all burnt out retail music employees look the same. And remember, it only takes about three months to make a crispy critter out of the most idealistic youth. I certainly am neither.
Disobeying the first law of both retail and military endeavors I volunteer. A wise floor guy is a pessimistic floor guy. At this point I notice a miasma of alcohol blooming about her. About three glasses and a good lunch I hope. I guess those rosy cheeks aren‘t apple induced.
"I’ll be delighted to look into that for you. Could I have your name please?"
"Patrice Plomptakakis. In fact, whoever I placed it with looked a lot like one of you two." Personally, I’m flattered, Gary is much better looking than I am under the best of circumstances, and today I’m working with about three hours sleep.
He has a lean oval face with Asiatic almond eyes, and is of American-Vietnamese origin. My long craggy face looked so cadaverous this morning that I figured I could give Iggy Pop a run for the money for butt ugly. Canyon wrinkles interlaced with tributaries and scars flared from a twice broken capillary laced schnozola. And of course, Iggy has a much tighter body and a real career. Makes me wish I had slept with David Bowie. Too late now.
Gary’s hair hangs flat and enviably neat in a styled shag that my unruly salt and pepper can only pitifully emulate. But hey, maybe after a couple of bottles of Thunderbird the four of us might look like quadruplicates.
I look up the ticket under her name and find nothing, simultaneously watching with despair as one of my SA colleagues rings up a profitable Tokamine with all the optional fixings for someone I had greeted and engaged in a conversation with not a half an hour earlier.
I assault the computer and pray to the electronic Gods of velocity and efficiency. They’re doing an early lunch at the saloon.
"Ms. Plomptakakis, I can’t seem to find anything under that name."
"It could be my son, Patzer Plomptakakis."
"Could you spell that please?"
Oops, there goes a Crate 212 amplifier. A very profitable item flying through the hands of one of our clerk/drone types who probably will soon implode.
I call up God, and and ask "why me?" However, God remains nothing but a dial tone, and nothing comes up on the computer either.
I am sweating bullets, as the customers in the store are biting like stream trout in mating season. I could swear I can see Gary‘s lean mean reptilian brain making vacation plans looming like a comic strip cloud above him..
Desperate for a shortcut, I figure I may as well take a dive in the warehouse. Aside from the fact I can barely stand to watch nice pieces of my rent and bills heading into other SA pockets.
If it’s going to get ugly, sometimes it’s better not to watch. So I take refuge in one of the great timeless dodges, used over and over when backpedaling is the order of the day:
"Listen, Ms Plomptakakis, our computers are running really slow today, and maybe that’s why nothing’s turning up. Let me go inside and see for myself. Personally."
Make the customer feel special if you nothing in hand. I must confess, personally I would rather watch her fall down the escalator stairs into a shower load of serial rapists, but my preferences are innocent, since they will not occur.
Already I’m getting a very bad feeling about this. And this bad feeling is about the only aspect of this experience that will prove to be absolutely on the money.
Safely inside the warehouse, and fortunately for me, my (unfortunately) soon to be fired warehouse manager, Rocco, happens to be working, . Rocco is a five foot eight Puerto Rican slab of grade A worker meat. He possesses a Mexican’s work ethic that a ten hour day of back breaking labor represents an easy day in one’s life. He’s excellent at his job, so this could be a huge help.
(Soon to be fired for making a politically incorrect remark to an African American new hire whom he found sleeping on the job.)
Nevertheless, things follow a simple and completely logical hell bent course from bad to worse. We can find neither trace of said Velazzi Schlemuli , nor any relevant record of it, other than it went in, and that every now and then the store has sold a couple of them used. No serial numbers available.
This ain’t looking good. Following the "when in doubt buy time by qualifying, I go back out. Maybe Rocco will find something I’ve overlooked.
"Well, Ms. Plomptakakis, could there possibly be any other name the repair order could have been placed under?"
"It might be under my husband’s name, Kazas Plomptakakis."
Bingo. I kick myself for not dot looking up the order under the last name string alone, but as the evil flower of the situation blossoms, I also will have cause to thank myself for the time it has bought me to improvise what is going to happen next.
However, since I am looking at a ticket, I have information, and information is power, as they say.
"I see that this went in back in June of last year. That’s quite a bit of time. That may explain why I can’t find it on our current repair shelf. After three months we classify it as abandoned property. Is there any reason why you couldn’t pick it up before now?"
"Yes. My husband was diagnosed with cancer, and finally died about a month and a half ago." Now every little rule we may have about customer owned gear pales in this perspective.
What’s a lowly Sales Associate to do? Well this one watches about a thousand dollars in Gross Profit go out the door through another Sales Associate. Dad just bought his worthless son a Gibson garbage guitar and an overpriced Marshall 50 watt garage band Scheissberg 6001 amp.
To put a financial cherry on my day, I know I’ll have to turn over my already patient, but restless customers to my fellow sales weasels, and pray that they’ll put me on the ticket. I think I know how that prayer will be answered. But if it’s going to be a shit sandwich day, we may as well have it with the grey poupon.
"My God, Ms. Plomptakakis, I’m terribly sorry to hear that. I have no doubt that it’s somewhere in the Guitar Sys Inc System, but it may take a little while. Do you have time?" I’m praying she’ll tell me she’s in a hurry, and is willing to resolve this tomorrow, but….
"I have all the time in the world. I know this is also my fault, and I really completely overlooked it, but my son, Patzer, reminded me, and he wants something to remind him of his father."
"How old is your son?"
"He’s fifteen, and is interested in the guitar."
"Ms. Plomptakakis, I’m really not sure of what to tell you at this point, but under the circumstances, the store itself is no longer responsible for the item-"
"Oh look, I don’t expect anyone to really care, but I owe it to my son to ask. He loved his dad." The trouble is that at this point I care. So, damn the money and full steam straight to hell. Having taken the high road to low places before, I know the map.
I reprint the order ticket. It’s got my department manager Gary’s name on it. The reason I think I jump into this so deeply is that subconsciously I know that this kind of failure to do the right thing first, could just as easily been executed on my part.
"Ms. Plomptakatis, I do care. And even though I’m just a Salesman here with no particular power, I have earned a certain amount of respect around here from simple hard work.
"That counts for something here. I started by working the door and cleaning the toilets. I also can tell you, that even though this is a really big company, there are real people behind the logo, and real people do real things. Give me a chance here."
"If you do, I swear, I’ll buy you dinner."
"You don’t need to do that. You’ve been through something really rough. I won’t say I know how you feel, because I don’t. But I can look you in the eye and tell you person to person that I have also known loss, and doing something for you that I am sure is the right thing is all I need as a reward at all.
"No bull. Let me go back in the warehouse and see what else I can find out for you, and one way or another begin to move this forward."
To reinforce this impression, before I dive back behind the door, I page Gary and Robert to the warehouse. It’s pow-wow time with Rocco.
It is a psychological cliché that only women become hysterical, but the following text will show that men also become hysterical as well. However, instead of expressing it with shrieks and tears, it manifests itself in the form of uncontrollable giggles.
I thank god the following exchange was safely behind double closed doors. The participants in this farce are myself, Gary, our brilliant sales manager Robert and Rocco.
Remember that with each sentence out of each participant’s mouth, the giggling becomes increasingly intense:
MYSELF: Look, she’s right out there and wants to know what the hell happened to her husband’s piece of shit Velazzi Schlemuli guitar.
ROBERT: (Robert "The Cobra" Cabalovich. A pretty boy’s chiseled face marked by colorless heat seeking eyes. Five feet ten inches of lean soft muscled fashionable rock man meat. So named for his ability to steal other sales associates deals and swallow them whole. At twenty five he‘s about two years shy of going soft in the middle.) "For Chrissake, she left it here for over six months, what does she expect? It’s abandoned property. "
GARY: It was a piece of shit in the first place. It’s not like it was a Gibson. It’s one of those big boxy hollow body guitars that Harry Hash grinds out as a proprietary.
MYSELF: Want to go out and tell her that? What the hell happened to the god damn Velazzi Schlemuli?
I also think to myself that the damn thing is one of these wretched, Pacific Rim Sweatshop pieces, where they make it look like a million bucks by having slaves paid at coolie wages pennies a day to keep throwing layers of finish onto the plywood soundboard that was probably recycled from old newspapers. No doubt ensuring their death by cancer before the advanced age of thirty.
If they were originally NYC papers, then there’s a serious dog shit parts per thousand issue. A beautifully enameled glossy piece of shit. But it’s also the kid’s dead dad’s piece of shit.
GARY: The usual. We waited about six months, put a penny into it, ate the repair and sold it.
ROBERT: So what’s her excuse, and what the hell does she want now?
MYSELF: This only gets better . Her excuse is that her husband died. She wants the guitar.
ROBERT: And it took her almost a year to try and claim it? She’s probably a merry widow. Offer her a red Mitchell and get rid of her.
MYSELF: He died of cancer for chrissake! For all I know it was months of protracted hospital sanctioned torture for all parties concerned. If he went down slow, we’re talking other things on the plate.
Does it get any better than this? Well it does! She’s got a son who wants to learn guitar. He’s fifteen. It’s gotta be something that at least resembles the damn piece!
Remember how you used to think then? Otherwise we turn into Beelzebub Inc., and if this ever gets to Corporate, where any pissed off kid can shoot an email, it’ll be a mighty big piece of shit to hit the fan.
ROBERT: "Okay. Sure. What the Hell. Make it a Joe Pass model if they need a hollow body! Hey why not throw in a Gibson case? Hell give her the whole fucking store. Get rid of the fat drunken bitch. It was her negligence, not ours."
MYSELF: "Get real. Does anyone else want to talk to her about this? Do you want me to get the manager in the loop?"
GARY: "Well, you’ve been talking with her, so I guess…"
I hope you haven’t forgotten that with each sentence the whole warehouse has been growing louder and louder with hysterical masculine giggles. For any possible female readers, I wish to mention that this kind of behavior for men is the other side of the coin of weeping, and most men will only do so in the presence of other males under the vast majority of circumstances, if at all.
It really does sound very "girly."
Had been a woman present, things would have been different, and the behavior more masked . Even though there’s nothing funny about this, it is such a classic FUBAR, that there doesn’t seem anything else possible to do to relieve the tension.
MYSELF: "I don’t go into gunfights with my dick in my hand. I want to know as much about this as fucking God. Get me the Vazulli hookah."
Unanimous silence, except for a stifled tee-hee. Gary runs the whole history. At the end of the year on 12/31/01 the guitar was bought by the store for a penny. It lurked in the used instruments area for a while and was sold about three months later, for $200.
A fiery pure profit death followed by an entrance into the realm of oblivion. A profit based on a practices reminiscent of the worst kind of anti semitic propaganda written in pre-Hitler Germany about Jewish pawnbrokers. Nevertheless, it still constitutes working by the book. Except for the little details that the owner died of cancer and the guitar is something his son wants.
"And remember that Human Resources has been on our asses about racist/sexist shit." The stentorian Jeff snaps me to.
"So watch your mouth, and get your honky faggot asses out there and make us some money!" BACK TO THE CONTENTS