THE GREAT GADFLY:

Counter Culture: The Meanest Kids In The World



For the first few months of my stay in New York City, I held a job at one of the most notoriously rude retail establishments in the entire city. The employees were so mean, they got written up in both the Village Voice and the New York Press as the vilest of the vile, the rudest of the rude, the snippiest of the snips.

The establishment in question, one of a small franchise of video/music stores catered to the discerning Greenwich Village artfag, continues to house the most wretchedly merciless indie-rock Grinches and put-upon Sallys in glum grey stocking caps and Trail Of Dead t-shirts, silently judging you as if their retinas came fully equipped with site markings and you were the poor lamb in the crosshairs.

I don't think I was very popular as a co-worker, but I had a great time. The first night of work was also the first night I'd ever seen a New York waterbug. I was petrified and cowered in a corner till my co-worker unceremoniously stomped it into a crunchy brown pudding. Sure, I was a big wussy poop, but the thing was the size of a kitten. And it had mandibles I could have used as tweezers. Cut a boy some slack. Or don't. See if I care.

I certainly didn't recoup any hipster cred points when I was FINALLY given the chance to select a movie to be played in-store, and much to the dismay of my NYC film-snob manager, I opted for the soft-lens Lily Tomlin sci-fi housewife epic, "The Incredible Shrinking Woman". To this day, however, I maintain that action was an unknowing act of defiance against the cultural elite - an act of lowbrow trash terrorism. At the time I just wanted to see Lily getting small in Tasty Meadows - honest.

Here I was, fresh off the boat from Indiana, with nothing but a dance belt and a tube of Chapstick to my name, and alluvasudden I'm working in the middle of a wonderland of obscure films and an entire store of music I'd never even contemplated before. And, helleau: Free Employee Movie Rentals. I almost didn't notice I was making zilcho wages. Who cared? I was young, in New York, and worked in the middle of a pop culture goldmine. Whee!!! Whee, I tell you - WHEE!!!

But you see, everything of worth comes with a price. Particularly in the (semi) fair City of Lady Liberty. Ya don't get nuffin' without paying for it.

My price to pay for enthusiasm and stimulation? I had to deal with the public. The NEW YORK CITY public, that is. For the first time.

Not fer nuffin', but when some bright-eyed tourist gushes a line at me like, "people say New Yorkers are SO RUDE, but you know all I've encountered are really nice, sweet, wonderful people full of sunshines and little kittie whiskers!", my face tends to pucker up like Ren the chihuahua when Stimpy's blown too much sunshine up his little doggy ass, and my three dry, crackling words of response are, to this day, "WORK. CUSTOMER. SERVICE."

There's a reason those disaffected slacker kids behind the counter hate you: it is because, dear reader, you are most likely what is known as "an asshole". Unfortunately, because of a few true, salt-of-the-earth assholes, all consumers have come to be envisioned as a collective stinking anal cavity by the typical disaffected customer service drone until proven non-asshole by some miracle of social graces yet to be discovered.

I'm sure you've noticed this, regardless of what side of the counter you work. There's no making friends with the cute guy with the spikey blue hair and the Gummo baseball jersey, because HE HATES YOU. Why? BECAUSE YOU ARE THE CUSTOMER. DUH. Chances are, you're going to make him look for a Celine Dion box set or some shit, and he's already suffered enough indignity for a thankless wage, thank you very much.

Last Friday, for example, when I went to my local wrecka stow to pick up an album that had been recommended to me, as I approached the register the Kelly Osbourne look-alike counter girl looked up at me as if I'd just flashed her my perineum, and then snarled, "HELP you?"

I smiled like a rattled soccer mom and oh-so-delicately handed her my purchase, confident that at least she wouldn't sneer at my hipster-cred selection of Sahara Hotnights, the latest right-on group of Euro rawk chicks hailed as "The Girl Strokes" (as if they need the boy's club validation, right?). OH, but no. She gave it a look, rolled the ol' eyes, and trundled her angst into the backstock to complete her damnable retail toil. I felt like such a filthy bastard for putting her out.

MORAL OF STORY: Don't think you can impress the disgruntled record store chick with superficial things like cool purchases, because it's who you are on the inside that she hates. It's nice to see that kind of integrity still exists in the bitterness of day-to-day life, no?

I feel like I'm being a little bit bigamous in my sympathy/criticism of those in the customer service industry and those who darken their doorsteps. Am I a sanctimonious "The Customer Is Always Right!" stalwart, or am I a for-the-working-stiff Slacker's Rights advocate who has walked the walk and understands just how idiotic and infantile the consumer masses can, in fact, behave?

Shucks, man. I dunno. Lemme go watch "Clerks" and I'll get back to you.

No, okay, seriously. Every one of us walks the line between odd bird out and that of the unthinking lemming-sheep. You'd be lying if you claimed to be exempt, you unique slice of uniqueness, you.

Ithink everyone should have to work a year in a customer service-related profession - the insights and etiquette we'd embrace in so doing would be mind-blowing. Still, no matter how much you understand the travails of working with the public, as a customer you're going to be guilty of just the same assholism that you saw on the recieving end of the sales counter. Sorry, can't be helped. And in that regard, I would warn the smug record store lass to contemplate a bit of Zen in her step. You never know when the mirror's gonna be facing y-o-u, ya know wut I'm sayin'?

(Of course, there is the option of a person just wanting to be an asshole for the sake of assholism as an aesthetic, without regard for silly little things like karma or balance or fairness or social grace. That's a completely valid lifestyle choice and a popular one to boot, but for the sake of argument I'm choosing not to recognize that particular demographic as the dominant species in this rant. Just sayin'.)

When I did my time in the world of retail, I noticed a four-level internal journey as my days of toil turned to weeks and then months:

1. My Karen Black at the Controls Phase, in which I knew nothing, freaked out a lot and took things way too personally.

2. My I Hate You Deeply Phase, in which I learned how things worked and held the public personally responsible for throwing a big, chaotic wrench into the perfect machine of organization that was my workplace. Lummoxes! Simpletons! It is during this stage that my mild OCD-isms became not-so-mild.

3. My Contrarian Zen Phase, in which my co-workers got on my nerves so I switched teams and sided with the customers, with the hope of pissing off my co-workers with a new-found bullet-proof placidity and a breezy set of social skills which I'd only recently pulled out of my ass.

4. My Not Giving A Shit Phase, in which I'm in complete interconnection with my position, people like or hate me completely at this point and I like or hate them completely right back. There's an established relationship between me and my workplace, and all is right or wrong in everyone's world. And as long as the paychecks keep coming, then, like, whatever.

All of what I've just written, believe it or not, is simply an introduction to an experience I encountered last weekend.

This past Sunday, I trekked over to my friend Lizard's part of town to check out her husband's art studio, as part of our sussing out space for a writing group we've been babbling about over the past few weeks. During my visit to her boho ghetto nabe, we dropped into a used bookstore that I'd always enjoyed but hadn't frequented in quite a while. Despite what I'd always recognized as its light glaze of prickly employee attitude in the past, I was always in favor of this place - I'm a junkie for the smell of old books anyway, so I'll tolerate a lot of shady sniffery for a nice huff of yellowed pages.

Last Sunday, I was amazed at how this bookstore had deepened into the bitterness abyss - or maybe it was ME that had changed for the softer, and the store had always been the way it was when I recently revisited it.

Either way, it was embarrasingly plain that THIS STORE IS OUT OF CONTROL.

Walking in, you're greeted by a klatsch of Adidas track jacket-wearing indie-rawk hot white counterkids, obliviously gossiping about who scammed on who at that Dogpaw Saints show at the Empty Bottle last night. You won't register on their radar unless you happen to be carrying a purse or bag of some kind, in which case, if you pass a certain point, you will be greeted with a curt:

"Umm, hi? We REALLY need to check your bag?"

When I was in the store last Sunday, a selectively eagle-eyed counter chick confronted a clueless middle-aged housefrau with a big ol' bolsa who didn't understand the need for confiscation. "You...you want to KEEP my purse?" the poor dear lady asked.

Cue counter chick's staccato sigh and the bizarre response of, "Um. Yeah. It's a size thing."

At this store, if you remove a book and don't reshelve it exactly where you found it, they re-price the item with a one-dollar increase. How do I know this? Because hundreds (and that's a conservative estimate) of index card placards have been pasted to every conceivable nook of the store, informing customers of this policy. They're fucking serious, man - these bookstore employees, they have enough to worry about. They don't need any of YOUR shit.

The same signage carpet-bombing technique has been applied to the store's overstock, with countless bold-fonted condemnations advising against touching tomes which CLEARLY are not ready to be sold to the public, duh.

Stumbling through this claustrophobic store, I was more aware than ever that I Was Not To Get Too Comfortable Here. Sure, it's mellow, there's a table in the back of the store, heck, there's even a bathroom and you don't have to ask for a key - junkie's delight - pass me the needle, Grammaw! But despite the creature comfort trappings, I still felt a pervasive and ugly pressure to find what I needed to find, buy it or don't, and quit burdening these poor kids with my graceless, burdensome flesh, which offends simply by virtue of not being theirs.

And the counterkids at this bookstore, let me tell you, they have the dismissive loathing thing DOWN. It's an art, I'll give 'em that - it's a language I picked up during my own retail daze, but if you speak it too much it gives you a cancer of the soul - but these folks either haven't learned that yet or they just plain don't have souls to begin with. Either is possible. But whatever the case may be, they give the notoriously evil New York punk rawk video store counterscourge a SERIOUS run for their money. I'd love to see a gang war between the disgruntled Chicago bookstore moppets and the disgruntled NYC videostore clerks. Bangs would fly and bracelets would break. Oh, the horror of it all. The delicious horror.

Part of me wants to think that the environment of this bookstore is a youthful, contrarian reaction to the stiff, unforgiving, oftentimes punishing work ethic of Chicago, which after all has been nicknamed "The City That Works!" (and so named NOT because it is famously functional, let's just get that clear).

Here is a work environment where the workers create a culture in which the guiding principle is for the underpaid staff to work as LITTLE as possible and for the consumer to feel DAMN LUCKY they have the honor of patronage at this establishment. It's a size thing? No honey, I'd say it's a turf thing.

In a city that confuses Catholic guilt with professional ethics, where better than in Wicker Park, the scrunge 'n' tatts ground zero of the midwest, to find the Bizarro World Midwestern Work Ethic? Perhaps this bookstore can serve as a museum for everything opposite the strangulating codes of conduct found in the concrete prisons of Chicago's Loop business district. Maybe this store should be roped off and offered as an exhibit of Rebellion As Business Management, and maybe we should just stand back and let this store's staff bubble in their righteous indignation until finally, their langorous rage runs out of target options and they cast their fickle pointing middle fingers of resentment at each other, like a movie version of "Lord of the Flies" directed by Todd Solondz.

I'd pay a dollar extra to see some of THAT.

Working with the public, I dunno, it's a thankless job not tailor made for the working youth who comprise the majority of such positions. Once a person matures enough to have the tolerance and appreciation for interacting with the many faces of humanity's consumer throngs, they've almost certainly moved past the need to work in a customer service position. Like I say, thankless all around, and who really has the time or initiative to figure out a way to improve this cycle of all around loathing and dissatisfaction? Yup, we're stuck with glib, surly video clerks and flummoxed, intellectually castrated customers. And so it goes. Have a nice day.

When we left the out-of-control Wicker Park bookstore that day, I mentioned to my friend Lizard that I'd never noticed before just how imperially prickly that place was.

"Yeah," she said, "it's getting pretty bad. And I hear they REALLY hate you if you have an MFA."

True or not, that statement made me feel really sad. For who or what, I don't know.




2003-10-14 - Last Haiku
2003-10-09 - Don't Cry Out Loud
2003-10-09 - Sit Down, You're Making Me Nervous
2003-10-08 - I'm Sure Miss Thing, I'm Sure
2003-10-07 - Carbonated Water, Caramel Color, Aspartame

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