Sweating through a summer on a construction site clean up crew as an impressionable sixteen-year-old, I learned firsthand many tips on how to survive the workplace. I named them “My Big 7:”
1. Always carry something with you at work. Otherwise, bosses will yell, “Hey, why aren’t you working?” Carrying something suggests you did something important back where you got it and that you’re about to do something important where you’re going.
2. Say you know what’s going on, even if you don’t. Nodding – even casual but confident shrugging – works to fend off future attention and unwarranted consequences. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
3. Make noise while you work. It insinuates great effort is being made and implies manliness. Doing this, bosses often don’t even check to see if you’re working, which is the whole point.
4. Choose tasks that cover the most physical space. Performing them highlights how much you’ve already done, especially in the morning when first impressions are crucial.
5. Always walk fast. You’ll come across as engaged, and walking is easy to do. Bosses naturally prioritize things and will scrutinize other workers who haven’t moved an inch for twenty minutes and will go to hassle them, not you.
6. Focus intently on objects. Even if it’s only a spot the painters missed, this makes you seem intelligent and insightful. But make sure bosses don’t actually come over to inspect your useless discovery. They’ll only badger you with comments like, “No. Get away from that. Jesus.”
7. Flaunt anything you know you’ve done right. As a result, superiors often assume everything else you’ve worked on has been done right as well. However, be sure that whatever you flaunt was done right, or this tip could backfire on you to no end.
Now – pretend you’re at your job right now. Isn’t it scary how most of the Big 7 are still applicable today?!
(The Big 7 list is found in Maybe Boomer, Chapter 7, “Responsibility,” that you can read more about in “Excerpts.”)
As I walk through the liquor department, I spot an eight-year-old boy gazing into the big display box filled with hundreds of honey and whiskey-based Yukon Gold 100% alcohol miniatures. His eyes are lit with interest. He can’t hold back temptation any longer and reaches his hands into the box. Mm-m, sweet honey taste. Warm colors. Shiny playthings. Perhaps he remembers the last time he was at the mall and jumped into the play pit containing thousands of soft, plastic, multicolored balls and how much fun it was to be totally surrounded by them!
“Hey! Get yer hands out of there,” the boy’s father exclaimed. “What are you doing playing with those?”
The boy’s testy papa continues to shop, walking the last aisle near the back of the department as a manly silhouette against a wall of alcohol ads and signs. His son meanders other aisles, enjoying the three-dimensional liquor store world of amazing colors and shapes.
Looking at a beer poster of young males socializing with brews in hand, I think back to the first time I had a drink. I didn’t have it until after I’d graduated college. I lasted that long because of how incredibly stupid and violent people became after they drank. Their changed behaviors made me wonder if I, too, might go into a similar la-la land after drinking. (Read more about my college temptation and ultimate abstinence from drinking in “Excerpts” and the passage in Chapter 1, “Competition,” from my memoir, Maybe Boomer.)
Then, after I graduated college and went on to teach high school in the 80’s and 90’s, I heard stories about my young student’s crazed, self-destructive weekend behavior from drinking. Their tales sounded much like what I saw in my college dorms. In fact, I heard hushed accounts about how many of my students started drinking in middle school, even earlier.
My hazy recollections are interrupted by the PA system: “Assistance needed in the toy department, aisle nine.” Uh-oh, has the boy gotten into trouble over there?
I notice the father round the corner toward the checkout desk, arms filled with his chosen liquor fare, when I see the boy gazing into the colorful Yukon Jack display yet again. I can tell he’d like to have one of those toy miniatures as a souvenir, but knows better than to ask.
As the two walk out the department past the ten-foot tall beer displays, I imagine a scene of the boy driving home past billboards, many plastered with images of movie stars, celebrities, pretty women – even the boy’s favorite sports stars – all enjoying their favorite alcoholic drink. He’ll see them again on TV and in the magazines lying around the house when he gets home.
The little boy couldn’t be more surrounded by alcohol temptation than swimming in the case of Yukon Jack miniatures themselves.
(The kid on the left – whoever he is in this video – is a dead ringer for me on my first ever bowl.)
If there was one thing my father liked, it was bowling.
On the night he drove the family to the bowling alley for the very first time when I was ten, I asked why he chose duckpin bowling over up-and-coming tenpin bowling.
“Tenpins are easy. They’re big and tall – anyone can knock them down. Duckpins are short, stout and elusive – now those take skill to hit.”
Dad may have been right, but to me, tenpins would be much more fun, like knocking a burly, sexy Marlon Brando down when duckpins seemed closer to striking Ethyl Merman off her stride, if such a thing was possible. But, since Dad wanted to show us how to bowl, not to mention get out of the house for a change, I was all for it.
Once at the alley, the first thing I learned from Dad was that the other five people in my family also got to bowl. After I rolled my first two balls in the gutter, then clipped off the ten pin in the far left corner on my third, I reached for a fourth ball. Dad interrupted with, “Others in the family bowl, too. And you only get three balls.”
I wondered if my composite first frame score of “1” was anything to get excited about. “That’s very good for somebody’s first try,” Mom said, which I knew meant “1” really stunk.
Dad rose to bowl next. In the same way he lined up two by fours against the blade before sawing wood, Dad stared down the old, chipped wooden pins before making his first move. Silently, like a well-oiled machine, he took three evenly paced steps and fired the ball. The gray-black sphere clung to the lane’s far edge when, like magic, it curved to the middle. Then, pow. The Brunswick cannonball not only knocked all ten pins down, but the collision sounded like a factory of porcelain dolls had just blown up. How many pins did Dad just bust? And when do I get to bowl next?
Waiting for Mom to bowl, then my older siblings Cathy, Don and Doug, was no fun, but I took it like a man and patiently sat on my hands until Dad said, “You’re up. Remember – follow through.”
I didn’t know what follow through meant, but assured myself it was something akin to “throw the ball hard, then follow it with your eyes.” Following Dad’s advice, I not only took three steps to launch my rolling rocket, but fifteen.
“You fouled,” Dad said, referring to the red light that signaled my foot foul to the entire bowling center. I thought this egregious error was as good an excuse as any to use for getting an0ther gutter ball.
Pressure was mounting. I’d used four balls to amass one measly point. Still, my hopes were high. My time was coming. I could see a strike on the horizon. No foot fouls – just exploding pins and lots of porcelain dust.
Toss number five was right down the middle, but started to curve, barely hugging the alley’s edge, before finally settling in Gutter City, its final resting place on the fringe of town.
“What?! Oh, come on-n-n-n,” I whined at the pins.
I couldn’t flub up like this again. My reputation as a fairly coordinated kid was on the line.
I fired my ball right down the middle, one that stayed there until impact. But, what? No strike? Instead, I received the duck pin menu specialty from hell, the all-too-familiar, overdone “chop.” Only two pins were knocked away from my straight on roll. “Shit. You bitch!” I yelled at them.
Uh-oh. I’d never used those words in front of Mom and Dad before. But walking back to the bench, expecting the worst, no one said a thing. Perhaps they couldn’t hear me. In dodging this bullet, and knew I better cool it.
Being last on the scorecard and watching everyone else get occasional spares, I shrunk lower in my bench seat with each frame. Dad’s praise was going to everybody else. I might as well be at home, quietly assuming the submissive posture I usually took in the family pecking order.
Then Don got a strike. Then Doug. Then the clowns bowling in the two lanes next to us blasted strikes. If I didn’t show up now, I was nothing.
Desperate, loose, and dangerous, I let it fly. Before I knew it, every pin disappeared from sight.
I jumped, fist-pumped and spun around. With jaw clenched, I swaggered to the bench, looking into my father’s eyes, as if to say, “Ev’ry goddam pin iz down, you bitches! Yes!”
From being in this new place called a bowling alley, I learned to be animated, that I could be animated, and that I sorely needed to express myself.
Sometimes it’s not what a father says, or does, or promises. It’s as simple as where he takes you.
I’m at work. I need a pencil. There’s three cups of miscellaneous writing instruments on the desk around me, so I finger my way through each one.
Pens, pens, pens everywhere – plus an emery board, magnifying glass, ruler, book of matches, clothes pin, lint remover, shoehorn, screwdriver, pliers – but no pencil. I’ve noticed this about a lot of desk top cups these days – no pencils. What? – the world does it’s checkbook balancing in ink now? What? – I could file my nails, get a closer look at my fingernails, measure this desk’s dimensions, light a cigarette, hang my laundry, clear my fleece shirt of lint, slip into more comfortable shoes, and fix my toaster, all before I could find a graphite writing instrument?
I finally hit pay dirt digging out a stubby pencil from the bottom of the cup. But, like all pencils scrounged from cups nowadays, the eraser is petrified and, of course, the graphite tip is broken off.
If good pencils are hard to find, pencil sharpeners are even harder. This place doesn’t have one, so I’m forced to use the knife I saw a minute ago. I’m no whittler and manage only to club the wood into oblivion trying to sharpen the point.
Frustrated, I realize I must resort to using – gasp – a pen to write with. How many of these cheap pens do I have to go through to find one that actually works? What happened to good old Bic pens that blanketed civilized places forty years ago? Still, what I’m really craving is a vintage Eberhard Faber or Lippincott pencil with a fresh, pink, gummy eraser. I make lots of mistakes when I write (ones I eventually “erase” when rewriting on the computer later).
Ah-ha, the computer, modern day’s eraser, and – for all that matter – pencil. But good luck finding a computer in the bottom of of a desk organizer cup.
Doesn’t anyone around here have a plain old pencil? Dammit. Where’s a pencil!?
Quote of the day: Everything in the world is good for something. –– Dryden.
Peter Roget is God, kind of. What would I do today without my 1961 edition of Roget’s International Thesaurus? It was a present given to me by my mother for completing my Lutheran confirmation classes.
At the time, after sweating through those confirmation classes, I asked, “Is this all I get, a book with a billion words and only one picture, a sick, sepia-toned print of the author, some guy named Roget?” Looking at his picture, all I saw was a stiff, scholarly guy staring back at me with an expression that said only one thing, “I am smarter than you will ever be.”
Unimpressed with Roget, for nearly a decade, his thesaurus was put to better use as a prop to hold up makeshift shelves in the living room that my precious TV sat on.
But one day, years later, when I needed to find a synonym for “lazy,” I slid Roget out, dusted him off, and life hasn’t been the same since. No more using “lazy” when there’s “dilatory, slack, shiftless, and lazy as Ludlam’s dog” around. I look at Roget now and give praise. What other gift could keep on giving like his thesaurus?
The answer is J.I. Rodale’s 1361-page synonym finder. I’ve been confirmed to the next level, and Rodale’s compilation of synonyms is the best around today.
Even still, I have Roget’s Thesaurus by my side. His book not only contains synonyms, precious American slang and colloquialisms, but is full of ancient, foreign and modern quotations at the bottom of each page. In fact, that’s where I found the quotation by Dryden for this post: Everything in the world is good for something. However, I could have found better use for Roget’s masterpiece than as some prop to elevate the almighty TV set on. How slack, lax and negligent.
Mike Andberg 