Listening:
Nirvana, Unplugged
Portisehead, Roseland Live
Tori Amos, Under the Pink

Driving for an hour and a half through heavy traffic with the only distraction of the distrubing noises emanating from under my car's hood my brain starts moving in circles trying to turn my life's encounters into sensible essays for reference later. Traffic also makes me realize just how much I truly despise people.

Now, I don't really hate you. The people that I know read this journal I don't hate (far from it) and the people I don't, well I don't know them, thus I don't really hate them.

But I hate people in general. This entry is dedicated to them.

I've always been a sort of an oddball. I'm not really much of a freak (despite my wallet) I just don't quite "get" normal people and normal things to do, and every single time I try to be normal and just shut up and play along I end up being discovered and shunted aside as the one that doesn't fit in. From the time in Kindergarten when the one main clique was a group of girls who played together at recess and shouted to each other in coarse Spanish and didn't like to speak in English in class but wouldn't associate with me, to these days when, after five years in the Camarilla I've realized I probably got over playing Vampire three and a half years ago. Most folks live and die by their vampire PCs but I can't even remember what it was that made me look forward to those Friday nights.

We've gone over why I hate(d) pre-college school... It's a little tough to explain in further detail without getting tedious, so I'll try to keep it short. Between Kindergarten and third grade I attended three different schools, in the fourth grade I went back to the school that I attended for Kindergarten. I learned to hate meeting new people in that time because they always had something else to tease me about. In first through third grades I went to parochial schools which have (I figure) one major advantage and one major disadvantage over public schools. The advantage is a very rigorous and focused curiculum (sp?) that is very challenging to students and helps instill discipline in the kids (in no small part because the parents were made directly responsible for many facets of a kid's work ethic). The disadvantage is that a purely parochial school doesn't have to meet many of the state's requirements for teachers and such and so can hire pretty much anyone to teach (usually the nuns are assigned to teach a grade), however the schools I attended usually tried to hire people with teaching degrees and credentials and such, but they didn't have to do wacky things like major in Child Development the way my mom and her classmates did. The end result was that often they could be emotionally distructive without really knowing it, and didn't always help students with concepts. A lot of that time was spent learning things by rote, but those grade levels are for that sort of thing (ie multiplication table, cursive writing, history).

Just trying to give you an idea...when I got to fourth grade at public school the difference for me was huge. I was reading at a level somewhere between sixth and seventh grade (they figured), I was frequently caught spacing out during history because they were going over stuff I had already studied a year earlier. To give you an idea - In the third grade we had to write a whole five page essay on a president that was assigned. I got Herbert Hoover. In the fifth grade we had to write a a three page essay on any president we liked. I was one of about three students who didn't pick Abraham Lincoln. Some of the students had new material to tease me for when the teacher praised my essay. Which just got all the uglier when I tried to tease them for complaining about how hard the assignment was.

Anyway, so I spent a lot of time being "teacher's pet" eventhough the teachers usually tried to avoid such a fate by occasionally ignoring my raised hand when they asked a question. (Teachers by themselves are an interesting lot, they sometimes ignore their student's reasoning capabilities when it comes to some matter not relevant to the classroom - ie, something seen on TV, what Mom made for dinner, the trouble Dad had with the car. And then turned around and were eager to show how smart and well-travelled they were - I still remember my third grade teacher telling us how she had eavesdropped on a conversation at a restaurant where a man was talking about "pot-pouree" and she just couldn't resist interrupting and make it clear that it's actually "poh-pouree" and all us kids looks at each other and decided we had no idea what potpourri was, or the time a fifth grade subsitute told us about visiting France and how their television was well behind our own and they didn't even know JR had been shot! I don't think it dawned on her that we didn't really know who JR was or why we would care that Dallas was delayed in France. I sure wasn't allowed to watch TV late enough for when it came on. This should be its own entry, I guess, but I feel it's worth mentioning that protecting the impressionable minds of young kids from the agenda of religious education is really a bullshit notion when compared to the general stupid tangents teachers can go on if they don't stick fiercely to their curricula.)

In high school and college things were a little better because folks seemed mostly to self-absorbed to give me much trouble. I started being Nobody right then and I liked it quite a bit. (Of course, observing people so very closely had a few draw-back and one of them was it very nearly turned me into a complete, full-fledged stalker.)

Fast forward to college and having no money and getting the only sort of job that someone with few talents and no appreciable skills could get - customer service at the bookstore. I ended up working in service for more than four years and my current job description is so convoluted that I usually pick "customer service" in serveys when they only offer a limited amount of choices.

Working behind a computer to deal with people, in my estimation, is roughly ten thousand-fold times better than working face to face or even on the phone. I had a teacher in college once, who was possibly the worst teacher I've ever had, but at least she was a very engaging person, who told me about trying to get a job fresh out of college with a degree in theatre. She went into service and found her degree came in very handy when it came time to wish customers a good day. I guess it is lying, but only a little bit. Granted, when I would say "Have a good day" to some folks what I really meant was "God, I hope a piano falls on you and leaves you to a miserable lonely life the likes of which you couldn't possibly imagine, but I hope really, really sucks." And some folks were nice and when I said "Have a nice day" to them what I meant was "Take care of yourself! Watch out for falling pianos!"

At my first gig - the school bookstore - I got chastised often for not having a good attitude and even got customers frowning at me for my bad manners and sour demeanor. I didn't really learn good *service* at that job, but I learned how to fake it, and when to hide when I knew it wasn't going to happen. Getting hired at other places was harder since I didn't have work study money on my side so I really had to sell myself, which meant walking into interviews with cheek-splitting smiles and being friendly and gregarious with people I didn't know. Interviews have always been a challenge for me because I'm terrified of people and I'm really, really terrified of leaving myself exposed and I'm absolutely petrified of having someone examine me inside and out and deciding I'm not worthy. I've had to learn to get past as much of that as possible to make it through an interview but there have been several that I've walked out of kind of shell shocked and scared of what had been revealed.

By the time I was hanging out at Best Buy hawking DirecTV systems (Why is it that people think that television will suck less if they have access to more channels? In my experience people generally find two - three cable channels they like and stick to them. Why do they then bitch about a system that has limited access to "free" channels when they could just turn the fucking system off and watch normal TV? How in the hell to people have so much time to watch so much TV and I can't scrape twenty minutes together to read everyday?) I was getting pretty good not having emotions or anything akin to a personality and just serve, serve, serve!! When I started I knew approximately shit about the system but I could still be nice and tell them that they wanted, nay, they *needed* this piece of crap, that their lives would not be complete, and indeed, they should buy the system right then, at Best Buy and damn Dish Network and the Good Guys.

I even yucked it up with people who would try to buddy up to me and ask me if I *personally* thought that the system was good (did it work well at my home, was it worth the expense). Occasionally I tried to come up with some lie about how wonderful the thing was but just didn't care enough to carry it off with any conviction. Since I had their confidence (I figured) I let them know that I didn't own a TV, and in fact did all of my TV-watching standing in front of the sets at the store. Most laughed at this, a couple tried to get insulted that I didn't think TV was worthy enough for my time (the truth, of course was murkier - I lived with my parents at the time and they had a TV but had always resisted the call to add more junk to the idiot box, something I had really resented when I was kid but now applaud them for, of course, I don't live with them now and I still don't own a TV, nor do I want one). But I still turned most of these folks into buyers. Well, okey, the neato-complete-o electronic toy did most of the work, but I showed them where to sign on the dotted line.

But that gig at Best Buy made me decide that I never, ever, Ever wanted to work in service again. At least not without an extensive barrier between me and the people I was dealing with. When I first started out as a cashier at USC's Bookstore I was behind the counter and never budged from it, except to cash out. When a customer had trouble finding a book and came to us we would lean over the counter to point them in the right direction. Very few got mad that we wouldn't go show them where the book was. If that tactic failed we directed them to a different desk where they could get more help. We would occasionally get some really irate customers as much because they would get ticked at the cost of textbooks as we were of limited use and not really interested in chatting with alums about how the campus used to be set up twenty or forty years ago. Some of the folks got a kick out of it, but it got old really fast.

Other places I worked at I only occasionally had the luxury of hanging out behind a counter. Generally when a customer wants a certain product at most book or music stores they find a worker and ask where thing X is. Said worker usually will lead the customer to where thing X is, and most places I worked at instructed us to make sure to place Thing X in the aforementioned customer's hands. One place in particular sang the anthem of "upselling" which is a technical word for getting people interested in buying all sorts of extra shit they didn't want and sure as hell don't need.

But sometimes customers would come in and not know what Thing X is, but know that they really, Really want it. Ever try to find that big, thick "blue book" that was on the TV last night? I have. When none of the books on the bestseller list, or on Oprah's shelf, with the blue covers are the one that the customer wants there is nothing left to do but hunker down and steel yourself for the forty lashes said customer is going to give you for your ineptitude and worthless place of business. Do you remember that Mambo #5 song that was popular some time back? I don't particularly cause I've only ever heard a little piece of it (and it sounds nothing like mambo). But I remember the first customer that came into the store demanding to buy the single of "that one dance song they keep playing on the radio." At the time I only really listened to KROQ and that was on the way to and from work (a whole twenty minute drive). It was really hard not to laugh at him when he started to get mad and demand to know why I was working in a music store if I never listened to the radio. Somehow telling him the truth - that with a degree in theatre I was only suited for working in service - seemed inappropriate.

Ani di Franco wrote a whole song about telling us in the service industry to just "suck up and be nice." Depending on my mood I can either see her point or it just ticks me off. When a customer comes to me with no attitude, just a question or a problem that I can either deal with or find someone who can help then we're good. It's when they either want to be my best friend, or chat with me about a lot of shit I can't be bothered to care about or when they're the ones apparently having the worst day of their lives then it starts to become troublesome because I really don't know how to respond. Over the course of a few years I figured out how to greet strangers with a smile, but it's a skill I've had to cultivate out of nearly nothing. It in no way comes easily to me. So with most customers I've come to assume that they just want to get what they want and get the hell out.

It was a theory that worked pretty well until I fuond myself working at Best Buy. People actually browse there. I don't really understand the notion of browsing, especially for expensive electronics, the likes of which you can't possibly need. That required a lot of patience because I wasn't working for Best Buy, I was working for DirecTV and my job was to sell exactly _ONE_ product to tons of people I didn't know. It would have been understandable if I were at the counter selling cameras. Folks want the best one that suits their needs, anticipates their wants and is affordable. But I wasn't. Best Buy only sells one kind of satellite television system, and really, there are only two systems on the market. So I didn't understand the folks who came in just to "look around" at the DirecTV setup. Most of them had practical questions like setting it up and how much stuff the needed to hook up all of their TVs. Some though, came in wanting someone to embarrass and belittle. Engineers of various sorts would come in to ask the speed of the cycles of something-or-other in the signal, or the exact designation of the satellite from which the dish got its feed and how long it was anticipated that this satellite would stay in orbit and where the signal would switch to if something happened to this satellite and on and on. A couple of times I tried to bluff my way through but it would always turn out that the dude worked for Hughes at one point and actually knew the fucking answer. And to pour piss in a festering wound, they would never buy the goddamned thing, they'd just get bored and wander away.

Of course there was that one guy that came in and made up his mind that this "little girl" couldn't know anything about what he wanted and directed his all of his questions to the guys behind the counter (all-male Best Buy employees who were there to sell PDAs, cell phones and phone accessories). The guys just turned around to find me *not* busy with another customer but just standing there with my arms crossed and with a smirk on my face. One guy pointed to me and said, "Ask her." And as one they all went back to ignoring him. I love those guys.

But the thing about Best Buy was that I didn't get to behind the counter. And I felt it. For strangers my sense of personal space tends to be larger than most people's and since I was working in one cramped corner, there was never enough space between the TV shelf and the counter, the people, their kids and the huge shopping carts Best Buy has. I'm not short, in fact I'm average to tall for a chick, but most guys are still somewhat taller than I am, so setting aside my innate nervousness of strangers aside was sometimes harder when these folks would walk right up to me, loom over me and dare me to impress them.

In the job I have I never had to deal directly with a customer. I get requests, but the only thing the customer wrote that I read is the stuff I go in and edit. (I'd go into more detail but I'm not sure where the legal lines are in this....) I don't deal with their e-mail or their phone calls and I'm good with that. From what I've seen and heard it can get pretty nasty. And I'd never be able to fake caring about them from what I've seen of their cumulative ability to write and/or build a Web page.

Someone once asked how I could ever hope to get into Theatre when I hate people so much. I almost smiled when I said "I'm going to be a director." This made all the sense in the world to that person.

gosh, I've been at this for over two hours. I should probably get to work.