Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Exhausting




I've worked quite a few retail jobs over the years. Most of them have been in branches of large corporate outfits. This summer's job, like all the others I've worked, has this corporate culture that seems to ooze its way into the pores of all who work there.

The thing I've noticed about many of my co-workers at "The Fruit Stand" is the extreme use of the cheerleader/valley girl cadence. They add several extra syllables to each and every word, and they tend to inflect every second sentence to pitch out like a question, even if it isn't a question at all. Strange.

The saddest part of all this is that I work with mostly men. I mean, at any given time, I might be one of 20 employees on the floor. And more frequently than not, I'm the only girl working in the dump.

Tonight, I was taking the T home with this guy from work. He has an extreme case of valley-girl-itis. He even goes so far as to crane his neck into impossible positions when he is articulating some (in his opinion) meaningful thought. At the end of our conversation, I was completely exhausted just listening to him.

How the hell can he NOT be exhausted exerting that much effort just to speak?

I'm baffled.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey,
There was an interesting peice on Dateline last night. It was called "To catch an i-predator" about people who steal ipods. In a way, the morons "stealing" the i-pods were set up. The didn't technically steal the i-pods. Dateline planted bags from the apple store all over the mall on benches, etc, with a store bought i-pod in the bag. They wanted to see if people would try to return them to the store or walk off with them. Naturally, nobody returned them and I wouldn't have either so consider me an official i-predator if you will. Anyhoo, they put special software in the package to when these clowns registered it, they were baggged.
The second segment showed someone undercover going into the Apple store syaing they found an i-pod and wanted the Apple peeps to trace it back to the proper owner. One store said they couldnt and fluffed the guy away. In another store, the kid told the person he'd do it but he wasn't supposed to. The kid did it, he didn't give the info to the person he said he'd make the contact himeself. I am sure once Apple saw that, the kid got shit canned. Then they actually contacted Apple and the outcome was that Apple states thay' re not responsible for tracing merchandise back to the proper owner, even if it's to deter theft. They claim they don't have the technology to do so, yeah right.
Anyway, if someone asks you to trace an ipod back to an owner, beware, it may be Chris Hanson in disguise.