Actually, Con Air Sucked Too

Though I hope to not fill this blog with sad tales of my workplace or, worse, even sadder tales of driving to and from my workplace, I’m still struggling to figure out what would make a good story here and what wouldn’t. So let’s consider the following a little experiment:

This morning I needed a stamp for an addendum to my January rent check that had to get postmarked TODAY (another story, much longer and fraught with pain--not to mention even lamer--than the following one, so I won’t go into it), and in asking around I learned that Deborah, our receptionist, was usually willing to sell stamps to employees as long as they only wanted one or two at a time. I took this to mean that these stamps must be from her personal stash, which I found a little odd but irrelevant to my own dilemma. So I walked to her desk and asked if this was true (that she sold them, I mean, not that they were from her personal stash)--you have to be careful with Deborah--and she said yes, “as long as you only want a couple.”

Wanting to show that I’d been adequately warned of this stipulation I said, “Oh yeah, I only need one.” This seemed to please her, and I’m all about pleasing people, so I began to feel like the transaction was going pretty well. She pulled a metal box out from under the desk, opened it, peeled off a stamp and handed it to me. Just as I stuck it onto the letter she said, “That’ll be 37 cents, please.” That’s when I looked down at the quarter and dime I was holding and wondered why I thought stamps were still only 34 cents.

One thing that might help you appreciate this story is a quick description of Deborah’s attitude. She’s usually perched right on that line between playful sarcasm and authentic annoyance, so that you’re not sure if she’s really rolling her eyes at you or just doing it for effect. It’s no exaggeration to say that half of the people in the building are afraid of her. So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I said, “Uh, they’re thirty-seven cents now?” She smirked that smirk of hers and asked me how much I planned to give her, so I held up the quarter and the dime for her to see. She only saw the quarter at first and practically shrieked, “You were going to give me a quarter?”

“No, no!” I fanned out my coins (can you fan out two coins?) to show her and said, “I thought they were 34 cents for some reason.”

She made a harrumphing noise and said, “This ain’t 2001, honey,” and I could only nod at that since I was still baffled as to why I couldn’t remember the correct price of a stamp. For as many bills as I pay in a month you’d think I might have it stuck in my head a little bit better. (Then again, the reason I needed the stamp was because I’d unthinkingly paid last year’s monthly rent amount instead of this year’s monthly rent amount--but I promised I wouldn’t get into that, didn’t I?) So anyway, since it was too late to give back the stamp without using a pair of scissors, I promised her I’d be right back with the two cents I owed her.

Only I didn’t have two cents to give. The thing is, I was so eager to get away from Deborah that I completely forgot I keep all my change at home in a big jar, because I hate change.

So every time I passed by the front desk for the rest of the day (which, it figures, amounted to about six times more than I normally would in an average day) she’d call out “Where’s my two cents?” or “I want my two cents!” which made me laugh--not only because Deborah’s got a great delivery (and because she has always been stoically unmindful of whether there are any other people in the reception area when she says stuff like this), but also because it kept reminding me of the pissed-off paperboy in that John Cusack classic, Better Off Dead.

So I guess the moral of the story is that I like John Cusack--even though he occasionally makes crappy movies like America’s Sweethearts and Serendipity.