by Dan Ryckert
My microburst experience was a thoroughly confusing and potentially dangerous night that I couldn’t have anticipated, but I’ll take that force of nature over one that can wield a knife any day of the week.
Phoning it In
Whatever gene is responsible for creating a great salesman is nowhere to be found in my body. If it’s something that I’m passionate about, I have no issues gushing about its virtues to anyone who will listen. If it’s a product or service that I don’t have strong feelings about, I find it impossible to put on a believable enough act to get someone to buy in. Luckily, only a few occasions have required me to even try.
When I first left for college, I effectively quit my job at GameStop. They kept me in the system so that I could come back in the summers to help out, but I was no longer on the weekly schedule. Even though I took out a large amount of student loans to help pay for tuition, I was really bothered by the idea of not having a job. Ever since McDonald’s hired me at the age of 14, I had been employed. I didn’t intend on stopping once I got to college.
Most job openings in Lawrence weren’t up my alley in any fashion. School-related positions were less than ideal, considering that I didn’t know anything about the university. Working at a bar wasn’t an option since I was still a few years shy of 21. I hoped to avoid another retail job, but it seemed inevitable at my age. After applying to a handful of places, I got hired for seasonal work at a Best Buy in Olathe. Since I lived in Lawrence, this meant that I could look forward to a 40-minute drive to work before every shift. A job’s a job, even if I wasn’t thrilled about driving that far for a low-paying position.
Best Buy would hire extra staff members for the holidays, then place them in different departments based on the store’s current need. When they asked me for my first choice, there was no question: I wanted to work in Media. This department was all about movies, music, and most importantly, video games. As a film student who spent almost all of his free time playing video games, this was a no-brainer. I left Best Buy management with no doubts about my preferred assignment.
They put me in Digital Imaging. I had never owned or even used a digital camera at this point in my life. My job would be to push expensive cameras on customers, then push harder when it came to accessories and extended service plans. First, I should probably learn what a megapixel was, and what the hell a CompactFlash card did.
By all of the company’s standards, I was a terrible Digital Imaging employee. I’d like to think that the customers appreciated me, however. When parents would ask me what the best camera would be for taking pictures of their kids’ life events and birthday parties, I’d never try to upsell them.
“Look, you’re not going to be printing up big posters of this stuff, are you?” I’d ask. “Then you don’t need this $800 camera. The $200 Kodak will be more than enough. Also, you can find a case for cheaper online, and the service plan is a rip-off.”
Weirdly enough, my numbers weren’t hitting the marks that my supervisors were looking for. After a few weeks of me convincing customers not to spend money at their store, Best Buy decided to move me to a different department. This time around, my job would involve selling HDTVs in the Home Theater department. Never mind the fact that my primary television was still an old 19-inch CRT that I had gotten for free from a FuncoLand display.
Once again, Best Buy had thrown me into a department that I knew nothing about. In terms of training, all I was told was that the 56-inch Samsung DLP was the best television our location offered. I’d pace the wall of screens during my shift, and sure enough, that one did appear to have the best image. Selling customers on this television wouldn’t make me feel like a turd because it was actually the one that I’d personally want the most.
Unfortunately, I knew zero details about why or how it was the best. When I asked my supervisor for some bullet points to share with customers, he wasn’t afraid to get technical.
“DLP means there’s a shitload of tiny mirrors in there. They bounce the light around and it makes the image look good.”
Works for me! No matter what questions my customers asked me, my answer always had something to do with mirrors.
“How about this one?” they’d ask. “It’s $300 cheaper.”
“Nah, no mirrors in there.”
“We just need something for basic cable. We don’t have the HD package.”
“I bet the mirrors will probably make SD stuff look better, too.”
Throughout my life, I’ve been in countless situations where I've had zero idea of what the hell I was talking about. Working at Best Buy ranks up there in terms of the most clueless I’ve been. Meanwhile, the doofs who worked in Media were telling customers about the “insider info” that they were supposedly getting from within the gaming industry. This usually involved tips from “confirmed sources” about how PlayStation was buying Halo or how Nintendo was days away from announcing its closure. They had the one position in which I could be really helpful, and they somehow knew less about video games than I did about cameras and HDTVs.
During most of these jobs in my younger days, I’d count the minutes leading up to my lunch break. At McDonald’s, I’d get two trays’ worth of free Quarter Pounders (plain) and McFlurries, and watch wrestling in the back room. At AMC, I’d sneak into movies and chip away at them one half hour at a time. At GameStop, I’d read the newest issue of Game Informer as I ate plain Quarter Pounders and McFlurries that I had to actually pay for.
Usually, break rooms served as sanctuaries built for slacking off and occasionally complaining about work. At Best Buy, it was completely different. Their break room that consisted of some tables, a bunch of chairs, and one television was unremarkable. The reason that it felt like a really lame Twilight Zone episode was because of the employees. “How’s your accessory attach rate today?” they’d ask around the lunch table. “I’m at 70 percent.”
“Ah, damn!” another would respond. “I’m only at 60, but I’m killing it with the service plans!”
Wait a minute, I’d think. Surely these guys don’t actually care about this bullshit, do they?
They did. They cared deeply, and not on an “I gotta pretend to care about this shit so I can get a raise” level. Something about the sales game and hitting percentages got these guys so excited that they’d talk exclusively about it during their lunch breaks. I’m sure that this trait wound up making them a lot of money in their adult careers, but it came off as painfully soulless.
During one lunch break, it seemed like I’d share the room with an actual human being. As I ate my plain Quarter Pounder and watched the Game Show Network, a guy from Car Audio named Rob entered the room and sat across the table from me.
“What’s up, man?” he asked.
“Not too much, how’s your day?”
“Good, good. Getting tired out there on the floor, though!”
Oh, wow! A genuine human thought! It may not have been the most exciting conversation topic in the world, but at least it wasn’t about boring-ass attach rates.
“How about you?” he asked. “You ever get tired out there?”
“Well yeah, on occasion. Being on your feet for that long can wear you down a bit.”
“I hear ya, man. Do you ever use anything to give you a little more energy to get through the day?”
Hang on, was this guy about to offer me cocaine? I was starting to wonder if this friendly conversation was heading somewhere else.
“Uh, I don’t know,” I said. “I drink a lot of Mountain Dew?”
“Nah, man. That stuff is no good. Tell you what, come out here with me for a second. I’ve got something for you.”
Okay, now I was curious. I surely wasn’t about to do drugs if that’s what he was offering, but I had to see where this was going.
Rob walked me out to his car and popped the trunk. He lifted its cartoonishly large spoiler to reveal four cardboard boxes, each filled with some brand of energy drink that I didn’t recognize.
“This one’s on me,” he said as he handed me a blue can. “Drink one on your break and you’ll be killing it for the rest of the shift! That Mountain Dew crap is filled with sugar, but this fuels you with healthy energy like taurine, guarana…”
I zoned out for the rest of his pitch, but I remember the part where he tried to get me to sign up for a subscription supply at $50 a month. For a brief moment, I thought I had found the one person in the store who was capable of a genuine conversation. Three minutes later, he was shilling products to me from the trunk of a car.
This run at Best Buy was mercifully short thanks to its seasonal nature, giving me a chance to head back to Lawrence and look for more fulfilling work after the holidays were over. I thought my search had come to an end when I saw someone in a full-sized chicken costume enthusiastically dancing on the side of Iowa Street. From my initial distance, I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be advertising. I just knew that I wanted to be that chicken.
I pulled into the parking lot and saw that the chicken was holding a sign for Bigg’s BBQ. Surely that same chicken wasn’t working around the clock. If he needed some backup, I was confident that I was the guy to pull it off.
“Is there a manager available?” I asked the hostess as I walked into the restaurant.
“There is! Can I tell him what this is concerning?”
“Yes. I’d like to apply to be the chicken.”
She summoned the manager, who sat down at a booth with me for an interview that was exactly as long and rigorous as you’d expect it to be. It took about three minutes and consisted of him telling me that I’d be starting on Monday, making a little over six dollars an hour. We shook hands, and I spent the weekend getting excited about how stupid my new job was going to be.
By Sunday night, I had a realization. I had no idea how to dance and the entire job description was “dance while you’re wearing this chicken suit.” I probably should have thought about that when I accepted the job. If they wanted me to run a Bigg’s BBQ sign through a lecture hall, I’d have no issues with that. Walking around as the chicken while clucking and pointing at the restaurant would work, too. But dancing? Nope.
I dealt with this realization in the most responsible manner I knew: on Monday, I no-showed and never thought about it again.
It was time to start considering other positions that I was completely unqualified for. My friend Scott painted campus buildings for a living and encouraged me to join him. I had never held a paintbrush in my life, but I figured that it couldn’t be that hard to dip a roller in a tray and then run it along a wall for a while.
The interview process was about as involved as the chicken suit thing, so I got accepted ASAP and was told to start the next day. A couple of vans drove around town at six in the morning and picked up all the painters, and then they'd drop us off at a girls’ dorm in need of remodeling.
Every room in the dorm had to be painted, so teams of two or three would tackle one room at a time. For the first day I told myself that I was enjoying it. Scott brought a boombox, and we’d listen to Patton Oswalt and David Cross comedy albums as we sloppily rolled paint on the walls. At the end of the eight-hour day, I went home happy with my first day of genuine manual labor.
When the alarm clock went off at 5:15 a.m. on day two, I was less enthused. My habit of sleeping in until two in the afternoon was in jeopardy, and my body was immediately rejecting the new schedule. I forced myself to get up and hop into the van as time seemed to move at quarter speed. Several times during the shift, I disappeared into rooms that were already painted and laid down for a while on the bunk beds.
Day three was the final straw for my lazy brain and body. I tossed paint on the walls for a few hours, then laid down on the bed. My eyes felt heavy, and I felt an immediate desire to stop doing anything associated with this job. I got off the bed, left the dorm, and walked home without telling anyone. I never went back.
I wasn’t cut out to be a dancing chicken or a painter, so I really needed to find something that would stick. While I was at the cafeteria one day, a job listing in the campus newspaper caught my eye. It was for the Kansas University Endowment Association. They needed students to call alumni and ask for donations. The pay and hours were great by college standards. It sounded sales-y, but maybe the “I go to school here, and you used to! Let’s talk about it” dynamic would make the process feel a bit more human.
KUEA knew that they’d have a lot of applicants, so they had interested parties meet at the office on a Saturday for a day of interviews and mock phone calls. At the end, they separated the 30 or so applicants into two different rooms. One group was told to sign up for their shifts, and the other was nicely told to go home. I was in the former group, so I signed up for my first of hundreds of shifts that would stretch on for four years.
Calling alumni was awkward at first, because we were encouraged to make small talk that none of the alumni seemed interested in having. You’d occasionally find an architecture or engineering alum who had specific questions about an old professor or building. I was always woefully unprepared for those—we were given fact sheets related to our day’s calling pool, but I never actually read any of them.
If you were lucky, you’d get a call or two a week that was at least entertaining in some way. One Valentine’s Day involved talking to a recent divorcee as she sipped wine in the bathtub. She ranted about the pratfalls of love and marriage, and would repeatedly remind me of her “sipping wine in the bathtub” status.
The most memorable call I ever made was to Brain. At least, that’s one of the names he gave me when he picked up the phone.
“This is Brain, also known as Thomas Jefferson, 8-4-3-4-5-6-5…”
He kept enthusiastically naming numbers until I cut him off and went into my spiel. At no point during the conversation did he seem to understand what I was calling about, but boy, did Brain love to talk about an endless variety of things. When I asked what he was doing for a living, he alternated between stories about being an FBI agent and installing light bulbs for two dollars an hour. He said that Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin was the inventor of Kool-Aid and personally coined the term “space-time continuum.” According to Brain, he also worked out of a laboratory in his home in which he subjected people to his music and then broadcast the process on closed-circuit television.
It was a rambling call that lasted almost half an hour. I was fascinated the entire time. There were clearly a number of screws loose in Brain’s brain, but he seemed enthusiastic and happy. When the call finally ended, I jotted his number down on a note and put it in my pocket.
That weekend, I was drinking with some friends and told them all about Brain. I still had his number in my pocket, and I was drunk enough to bring up the possibility of calling him on speakerphone. None of us wanted to use our own phones, so we wound up calling him using a website meant for deaf people. This relay service let you call a number and type what you wanted to say, and a middleman would do the talking to the other party. Then, they’d type the response back to the website user.
We typed in the number and pressed “connect,” then waited for Brain’s response on the screen. It was late at night, and we weren’t confident that he’d pick up. Then, we saw “relay operator typing…” appear on the screen.
You’ve reached John Adams, George Washington, Mr. Brain 3-4-2-8-6-4-3-2-1-5…
The relay operator continued typing numbers for a while until they gave up and entered “NUMBERS CONTINUE.” We had him on the line. When we asked what he was up to, he said that he was having a party and that we should come over.
Oh, man.
This happily insane man who claims he performs scientific experiments on people in his home laboratory just told us that we should come to his party. This would be ill-advised under any circumstances, but we were drunken college students and this seemed way too good to pass up.
We may have been idiots, but even in our state we realized that this was potentially a bad idea. Eventuall
y, we decided that if we had enough people coming with us, there probably wasn’t much we had to worry about. Ten drunk college students should be able to take a 50-year-old crazy person if things went bad, even if he had a couple of crazy friends with him. Nothing about my original call or our late-night correspondence indicated any maliciousness, however.
It was a hard sell to most of our friends who were still awake, but we managed to find a few enthusiastic buddies. On the way to the address that Brain gave, we argued in the car about who would be tasked with knocking on the door and doing the initial talking. It probably should have been me, considering I was the initial contact and ringleader of this whole thing, but I was way too scared about an insane man bursting through the door and stabbing me to death.
My friend Mike agreed to serve as the front line for the Brain Party Brigade. When we arrived in the parking lot, he led the way while a few others refused to go into the apartment building until they received a text confirming that we weren’t going to be murdered. Several of us stayed a few steps behind Mike as we carried beer down the long hallway leading to Brain’s unit number.
As we drew closer, I started wondering why we weren’t hearing any music or conversation coming from anywhere in the hallway. Wasn’t he having a party? Our conversation happened over an internet relay service, so it’s not like we were able to hear Brain’s voice as he invited us to his rockin’ get-together. Considering that he sounded absolutely insane when I talked to him, I’m not even sure what I expected a party hosted by him to look like.
Sure enough, there was nothing but silence as Mike walked straight up to the door. There was no shuffling coming from within, not even the sounds of a television. We had come this far, though, so we weren’t about to leave before we figured out what Brain’s party consisted of. Mike gave us a nod, then took a breath and knocked on the door.
