jennings rampage

Have I earned this ice-cold bottle of Michelob Ultra? Yes.

Today the vice-principal threw our sixth grade class a pizza party for reading the most books in all of Pine Ridge Middle School. It was that, or the director of operations threw our call center team a pizza party for having the best average handle time in all of the undisclosed major electronics manufacturer that doubles as my current Purgatory. It was hard to tell. So there we sat, twelve people just grateful for a paid break from our terrible jobs, along with two token members of upper management who were just tickled with the cold efficiency with which we conduct our business.

Shenique is the other new person on my team, we went through the training and indoctrination together. She’s a cute girl with a pretty ass and a real mean streak — when we were playing the what-animal-would-you-be icebreaker, she dryly quipped, “a female dog.” It’s hard to imagine a person more poorly suited to this job; her personality prevents her from even feigning sympathy with a customer’s situation, she lags a bit behind technically, and she’d rather fight than try to find a solution. She dreams of being a forensics expert in a crime lab, and she seems to have some sort of prison fetish. Next week, she’ll be taking the entrance exams to become a police officer or a corrections officer, and we bonded early on the idea that our days at the undisclosed major electronics manufacturer were numbered from day one.

So during the pizza party, the old guard knew enough to bunch together quickly, and Shenique and I were stuck at the table with the two upper management tokens. Those two just had a blast with their old stories and big laughs, offered me pizza no fewer than eight times (THANK you, Dr. Atkins), and I did my best to play that game. Shenique wanted no part of it, naturally, and I was sure our lives were in far more danger at that moment than we realized. So she and I managed to surreptiously talk about our respective progress at finding a way out: she’s working hard to study for those exams, and I’m gearing up for two job interviews in the next two days. Good for us.

And at some point, Token #1 excused himself, leaving Token #2 with the two of us. He wanted to know how we were doing, and Shenique was happy to let me do the talking. I told him the job was no problem, troubleshooting phones was easy, and that I’m looking forward to audio/visual training and working with televisions and DVD players. Oh, but what about the extra-jumbo telephone we make with all those features, isn’t that a headache? No, not really; I’m more troubled by the two lines of telephones with the known manufacturing defect that the company insists I’m ignorant of no matter how much evidence I’m confronted with. After all, I ended up blurting out, I don’t like lying to people.

Well, I suppose I didn’t mean to quite phrase it that way, but it felt good to say it. Token #2, however, felt the awkwardness for both of us, and after half a moment of silence and shifted glances, excused himself to share some final words of encouragement with the room before getting back to whatever spreadsheet he was examining.

When I do leave this place, I’m going to say it’s because of all the lying I was made to do. We got a memo the other day re-emphasizing the need for evasiveness on the topic of these defective phones, since there are reports that a class action lawsuit is being organized on behalf of the people who were sold these hundred-dollar paperweights and told there was nothing wrong with them. If I could only find the lawyer in charge of this effort, I would sell this undisclosed major electronics manufacturer out faster than I could imagine. I’m not loyal to this company, they deserve this trouble for having the arrogance to manufacture a defective line of phones and make no effort to correct their error and protect their brand name. I feel actual guilt about lying to strangers. My brother makes fun of me for that, but whatever. I’m not a good liar, and both ex-girlfriends and my mother could tell you that.

So yes, two interviews over the next two days. Come ON.