Jun 20, 2007

The Art of the Telephone

Here's a little tip for anyone who ever has an occasion to call a business establishment:

Be nice to the receptionist. Secretary. Operator/administrative assistant/office support staff.

Not just not-rude, but actively nice. And for the record, Smarmy Salesman Pseudo-Nice is only marginally better than not-rude. So really, nice. You don't have to kiss ass, just nice. If you've never called the place before, make like you're on a first date with someone who is not only hot, but also gently funny and kind to animals. Say hi, give your name, and act like a regular human being, if not because you actually are a regular human being, then because you recognize that the woman answering the phone Has What You Want. Remember, the secretary is The Gatekeeper.

And while I'm at it, let me chuck you another one.

Tip #2:

If you're told that party you've called for is currently on the phone, and would you like to leave a message in their voicemail?, never demand to speak to them "immediately". Because that ain't gonna work. And no matter how much you play on the windbag about how "it's really important", and no matter how many times you use words like "pressing" and "urgent", you're still going to hit a brick wall. Every time. The reason is two-fold and simple: 1.) If the secretary says the person is currently on the phone, then the person really is currently on the phone, and 2.) unless you own the business, sign the paychecks, or possibly fix the computers, no one is going to dump their current phone call for you.

Now, somewhere out there beyond the InterWebs, on the other side of a Compaq monitor from 1999, I hear a solitary, blustery "But . . . but . . . well, but I . . ." No dice, big fella. Not even for you.

Quick reality check: Dude, you're calling about acquiring Products. It's funnies. Or promotional pens. Or carpet samples. Or getting a Service. Photocopying. Back waxing. Whatever. No one's going to die in the two minutes it's going to take for So-and-So to call you back. I give you my word.

And since I'm on a roll, I won't even charge for Tip #3:

When the receptionist takes your call, all "This is The Company. How can I help you?", don't spoil the moment by demanding:

"IS THIS JACKIE?!?!?!?!"

or

"IS THIS KRISTA?!?!?!?!"

Chances are, you're wrong. And that makes it awkward. Then you have to get into, no, it's not Jackie. And it's definitely not Krista. And if you're all, hey, hey, but that's how I roll, then . . .

Tip #3b:

At lease nice it up with a "Hello there . . . IS THIS JACKIE?!?!?!?!"

And finally, Tip #3c:

Whatever you do, and in the name of all that's holy, do not follow it up with . . .

"WHERE'S JACKIE?!?!?!?!"

Dude, I have no idea.

Jun 13, 2007

Here Comes the Flood

So here’s how it goes:

I come home from The Company on Friday, all ready to slap on my Tiara of Truth and tell it like it is about the life of the working girl. (And that’s the working girl, not the “working girl”.) As soon as I walk through the front door of my parents’ house, my mother says, “Oh, the basement flooded last night, and a bunch of your boxes got wet. You might want to check them.”

Of course, I instantly go into denial, O’Brien Style. Because the basement can’t possibly have flooded when I had the foresight to call home from work to ask the Ps to go to the basement and check if the sump pump is working. And there’s just no way all of my worldly goods could be sitting in a puddle of water all day long, while I’m obliviously sitting at a desk, slinging invoices and flipping phone lines. How could that happen? It couldn’t happen. Because it just doesn’t make sense.

Unfortunately, my denial only lasts about 12 minutes. And then I start to sob like the world has come to an end. Curiously, Great Big Girl is silent during all of this. Could it be that her powers are neutralized by water? Or just that Irresistible Persuasion Beams cannot, in fact, persuade a flood away? Could floods be her kryptonite?

So I go down to survey the damage, and it is not pretty. And since I really wasn’t supposed to be living at home in the first place, all my stuff had been relegated to the basement, so all the stuff that got destroyed is mine. I know it’s totally gauche to talk money, but we’re talking some serious money. At press time, I’ve lost over a couple thousand dollars worth of books alone, and I’m still working on the mess.

I am devastated. Devastated. So I’m hauling stuff up from the basement and just bawling the big boo-hoo, trying to rescue things but trying even harder not to get more and more upset by each new item I find destroyed by the flood: My hand-written (and only) script for the original version of Body of Knowledge. Hard copies of all the gorgeous e-mails you sent me. The rough-draft scribblings of a poem I wrote for you during a union meeting. Everything I wrote before the age of 24, just a soaking mass of wood pulp and runny ink.

And really, the most important things in my life are all little scraps of paper: the pictures of us trimming the tree back when I was living at Tart Central. My souvenir from that time we went to House on the Rock—a little paper prediction from the Automaton Fortune Teller, warning me to stay away from a dark-haired man who wears a lot of jewelry. The opening-night card you gave me that’s really a 30th anniversary card. The flowchart I drew up to predict your behavior at my Prohibition Party—the one I never gave to you because I was afraid you’d think I was too nerdy and childish. The Queen of Hearts playing cards I randomly find on the ground—always in my immediate path, always the Queen of Hearts, like a sign from the Universe.

Gone.

So I call up Trudie. (Again, it’s really easy—it’s just like Trudy-with-a-y, only you use an “ie” instead.) And I leave an uber-casual message, like I always do when I ring someone up in a panic, only to get hugely embarrassed about my panic once I hit a voice mail recording. Trudie calls me back, and I give her the scoop, and she’s really good about it and lets me rant:

“I just need one Good Thing to happen—just one Good Thing to give me some kind of hope—between the Faculty Job Search and the Living at Home and the Living in the Suburbs and the Being Completely Broke and the Alleged Video Camera in the Ladies’ Toilets at The Company (yeah, more about that later) and now a FLOOD?!?! I just need. One. Good. Thing.”

And while I’m pitching my little fit, I’m also rifling through my rescue piles, and I reach into a bag of performance art supplies (no, really)—in this case, mainly packages of colored tissue paper that have somehow resisted the water. And out of the bag I pull a full-sized Almond Joy candy bar, completely dry and, judging by the date I bought the tissue paper, approximately eight months old.

And yes, I ate it.

Could it be that Hope has a creamy, coconut center?

Jun 6, 2007

The Origins of Great Big Girl

Here’s the secret:

I’m actually not always myself.

Whenever I got angry as a teenager, I’d close my eyes, and I could actually see an image of myself or whatever shooting straight out of my body and into the air like a missile, and once it reached its pinnacle, it would explode, but not into a million little sparks of color. Instead, it would explode into a vast, miles-wide version of me. And then, high highhigh in the air, tall as the sky and wide as the whole county, I’d bellow in a voice that vibrated the earth and shook the squirrels right out of the trees:

I. AM. SSSOOOOOOOOO AAAAAAANNNGGRRRRRRYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!

And I could see the tiny little people on the ground, their faces tipped up to the sky, and I could see the understanding in their eyes: Damn, that big girl is pissed off.

It was really confusing for me as a teen because I saw that un-bottled-genie version of me every time I got angry, or pissed, or righteously indignant. Every time I felt wronged or saw someone else being wronged. There she was, bursting from my body, trumpeting the truth that my soft, human body couldn’t seem to manage. It wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I found out who she was—that she was the other me, the superhero me. That she was:

Great Big Girl: Feminine Avenger!

Great Big Girl: Pink-Collar Hero!

Now, I’m basically a good-natured girl. I’m reasonable, logical; I like to have a laugh. I like to think I handle most situations with effective, if somewhat unusual, methods and a goofy, bumbling charm. But then there are Those Times—you know, those times when you find yourself in the middle of one of those absolutely ridiculous, This-Is-Such-Crap-That-It-Must-Actually-Be-A-Movie-And-Not-My-Life situations. Those times that are specifically engineered to try to get a girl down. And as much as I hate to admit it, sometimes The Man gets me down—particularly when he has his big black boot on my pink-collared neck. That’s when I feel the transformation.

Great Big Girl: Feminine Avenger! First began her work in A Town Near You, when she used to roam the streets with her do-gooder cohorts in the Genius Patrol—most notably her superfriends known as The Love Handle and Little Sister: Champion of the Underdog!. They stayed out late and fought injustice, all while drinking cocktails and bantering wittily (and drinking more cocktails) in their fiercely accessorized costumes. At the time, nobody knew that Great Big Girl was also a Pink-Collar Hero, since I—Lulu O’Brien—was a mild-mannered graduate student and teaching assistant then, rather than a mild-mannered secretary. And as such, people assumed I had origins in the middle-class, rather than the truth—that I was the big pink baby of a blue-collar family. So instead, Great Big Girl was simply a Feminine Avenger. She fought for the ladies who were wronged in love or bullied by bosses or who, for one reason or another, simply needed a girl to get her back. She became notorious for her favored Shove-and-Run technique, in which she would locate the offender in a public setting, push him down, and then disappear, leaving said offender to be ridiculed by passers-by for having been pushed down by a big girl.

But Great Big Girl has grown up. She has honed her skills. In addition to a Pink-Collar Hero, she has officially become a Force To Be Reckoned With. Here's why:

Great Big Girl shoots Irresistible Persuasion Beams out of her magical push-up bra!

She hypnotizes her target with the swaying of her hips!

She scores all the secrets with her SuperHuman Eavesdropping!

She lulls aggressive scalawags to sleep with her Soothing Telephone Voice!

She neutralizes her enemies with her Surprisingly Disarming Smile!

And here’s what’s what:

Great Big Girl does not get flustered or upset. Great Big Girl does not get bullied. And Great Big Girl does not fall for your tricks.

Instead, Great Big Girl says, “Hey hey, slow down, big fella. Where’s the fire?”

She says, “Hey Chuckles--quit riding my jock. Can’t you see I’m working here?”

Listen, Great Big Girl’s not going to take any of your guff, ya see? So why don’t you just turn around and take the ShoeLeather Express right out a here, Buster.

In short, Great Big Girl has the skills to Get By.

And girls, she’s got your back.

Jun 4, 2007

How Did I Get Here?

I never would have expected this.

Never in a million years.

Here’s the dish:
Despite all of my juvenile protestations—and frankly, a number of adult protestations as well—I have moved back to my hometown in what I call the “Greater Chicagoland Area”, which really means the “Far, Far North Suburbs”. If you take 94 North towards Wisconsin, past all of the posh suburbs littered with private drives and trustifarian kids and grocery stores that hire minimum-wage laborers to remove your items from your cart and place them on the conveyor belt for you; past the social-climbing suburbs with their shiny Hummers and obscene mansion-sized houses on sad little split-level ranch-sized lots; way up to the suburbs that have no real industry and therefore no real hope—that’s where my people come from. That’s my hometown. The town that I couldn’t wait to see the back of. The town that couldn’t hold me when I was twelve years old, let now that I’m t . . . well, let’s just say now that I’m older. And somehow, I’ve found myself back here.

I now live in my Hometown. (P.S. With my *parents*.) I work in an Office. For a Company. Which is mainly a Factory that provides a Service. I commute an hour each way, each day. I’d say that I punch the clock, but I actually punch in my Social Security numbers, followed by the pound sign (#), and then stick my hand into a CIA-style hand scanner. (Seriously. But more about that at a later date.) I have no Official Job Title, but I’m basically a secretary. I do receptionist duties—multi-line phones and all that. I do accounts receivable. I maintain customer files. I get paid by the hour. Very little. You know, your classic pink-collar girl.

Here’s how I was blindsided:
Last fall, I defended my doctoral dissertation. At the very end of August—just in time to make it impossible to find a faculty job for the ’06-’07 school year. At the time, I was also homeless. My lease had run out in the middle of August, and having no job lined up in A Town Near You and, honestly, no sight of the future beyond The Defense, I opted not to renew. I packed up all my stuff and stashed it in my parents’ basement and lived basically as a squatter. My friend Esmerelda had skipped the state several months earlier, and her condo still hadn’t sold, so although the realtor wouldn’t allow me in the building from the hours of 8am to 10pm, I was free to crash there post-10. As long as I was out by 8. So I did. Me, a suitcase, an air mattress, and a Hot Pot. (P.S. There was running water.) So during the days I hung out any place where it was socially acceptable to stay for a long time and not buy anything—meaning lots of time in libraries, Barnes & Nobles, and antique stores. Coffee shops were pretty useless because they expected you to buy something eventually, and this girl was flat. Otherwise, I’d find a place to park and hang out in my car.

So that was that. Squatting for about a month, and then once I defended and deposited my dissertation—becoming Doctor Lulu O’Brien, thank you very much, or Lulu O’Brien, Ph.D., if you prefer—I spent some time driving around, visiting friends and family because hey, I was done, and I had a little time before and Artist-in-Residence gig I had lined up Out East. And when the time came, I hopped in the Biggest Pickup Truck Ever and drove Out East with my friend and partner-in-artistic-crime, Trudie. (That’s just like “Trudy”, only with a “ie” instead of a “y”.) We crashed out with my friend Clark (who is actually a superhero, too, but more about that later). We hung out and made some art and ate pierogies, since they love a pierogie out there.

That was a month, and a few days flying solo on the road, but then suddenly . . . nothing. I had nothing to do. But perhaps more significantly, I had no place to live. I had some cash from the residency, but not enough to rent an apartment, and since I have two cats—Rudy and Baby Girl—I couldn’t exactly live in my car. (And believe me—I tried to figure out a way to make the car work, but a tiny little space with a litter box built for two? Not pleasant.) So my parents suggested I live with them. Insisted, really. And seeing as I had no other options, I accepted.

I spent a couple of months hiding out in my 8 x 10 room, mainly sleeping and watching BBC America. And every re-run of every Law & Order series ever invented. Then I started spiffing up my CV between L&O marathons, and I started applying for faculty jobs for this fall. But then my meager funds ran out, so it was time to get the Placeholder Job. You know the Placeholder Jobs—the ones you get to get you by until Something You Really Want To Do comes along. Some people wait tables. Some deliver pizzas. Move furniture. Sling lattes at Starbucks or fold sweaters at the Gap. Me, I Temp. Usually. But what with monster.com making it so easy and all, I found myself sending out my temp resume to regular office positions.

Which is how I ended up at The Company.

But here’s the question:
What’s a girl to do when she finds herself financially stuck in a quiet, unassuming life, pretending to be a quiet, unassuming secretary, when in reality, she has a superhero inside?