Slice of Life1:27 AM, 2 December 2000 I saw a dead body today. Right now, I'm listening to the Salt Lake police scanner over the internet. "275 in progress." Today started like all days. I slept in till noon, ate some chili for breakfast, answered my email, read a little scripture (1 Maccabees today), then headed off to work. I picked up my paycheck before signing in. I'd gotten paid for twenty hours of overtime I didn't work, which lifted my spirits a bit. "Go ahead." Work was busy until nine, so time went by quickly. I caught up the nerve to talk to a cute girl sitting next to me named Marina. She didn't know English that well. At nine thirty, they wanted to shampoo the first floor, so they moved us all up to the third. There, I sat next to another cute girl, this one named Marine, and chatted with her about work for awhile. She left at ten thirty when her shift ended, along with almost everyone else. "Black TransAm. No plates." After ten thirty, I was alone. I had a year old magazine with me which I managed to read cover to cover, occasionally pausing to answer a call. As the end of my shift, half past midnight, approached, I felt tired and ready to sleep as usual. I leaned way back in my office chair and closed my eyes. I woke up when I received a call. I wasn't able to do anything for her, but as she hung up, I heard her say, "Wow, he was polite!" which gave me some small amount of job satisfaction. "Delta thirty-two." Another fifteen minutes or so passed and I saw it was time for me to go home. I closed down all the programs and was about to log out of the phone, when I received another call. I said, "Thank you for calling Cell Phone Company. This is Jay. How may I help you?" but I heard only hold music on the other end, so I hung up. As soon as I did, I got another call, which surprised me. The man on the other end said he'd just been talking with someone else and got disconnected. That meant he was a difficult customer and the previous rep he was talking with hung up on him. I should have hung up on him myself, but we weren't supposed to. "Possible under age drinking." After about ten minutes, the man got frustrated with my inability to help him and put his wife on the phone. She quickly became equally frustrated. I explained again and again that I couldn't help with their problem and needed to transfer them, but they didn't want to be transferred. She asked for my supervisor, but when I finally found a supervisor, he refused to talk to her since he couldn't do anything. I got back on the phone and finally convinced her to let me transfer her. It was almost one by the time I got off the phone. "Fourth South, West Temple. Right in front of the bank." Driving home down Bangerter Highway, I saw half a dozen police cars on the northbound side. There were at least as many dented and smashed cars. Glass and pieces of cars spread out underneath them and into the lane I was driving in. I slowed down and craned my neck. I saw three men standing around a forth unmoving figure lying face down in the glass, limbs twisted in an uncomfortable position. 1:13 AM, 3 December Like a repeat of yesterday, I received a call just as my shift was ending which took me half an hour. As I drove past the scene of the accident, I looked over to where the body had been lying and saw they still hadn't swept away all the glass. 2:15 AM, 4 December Ryan said something to Jim today which made me rethink my life's philosophy. I've talked with each of them before, so I guess I'll give you some background into what I know about them. Ryan was picked on ruthlessly when he was younger, so he doesn't let his ten year old son have friends because he doesn't want the same thing to happen to him. He ridicules his son himself, to toughen him up so that when he enters the real world name calling won't affect him. His wife's a tree hugger who once scolded a child for tearing leaves off a tree. "Don't hurt that tree!" He says his wife dresses like a combination of a polygamist wife and a hippie. I said that was a unique style of dress. "It isn't really," he says. He lives in the polygamist part of town and admires the fact that they home school their children. He wants his son to be raised by polygamists. If I laugh or smile at anything Ryan says, he insists that he isn't joking. Jim, the office religious fantastic and also the office dirty old man, ("What should a woman do if a man tries to rape her? Beat him off.") is always trying to get everybody to look at this packet he carries around with him. Ryan says it deeply disturbed him and that I shouldn't read it. Jim brings a Bible to work with him. "Never be too careful," he once explained to me when I asked why it had a camouflage cover. When he saw that I knew Ryan he told me, "That guy is really evil. REALLY evil." The time he sat next to me, he went on and on about the events of the Apocalypse. Everything he talked about was new to me, which is surprising since I'm quite well read in Biblical literature. Anyway, Ryan and Jim were talking about love, which is my favorite religious subject. When asked what the most important commandment was, Jesus said it was to love God and love your neighbor, for if you do that, you're obeying all the other commandments. Ryan said that if everybody loved their neighbor as themselves, the world would be a perfect place, but that can never happen, since evolution has made humans selfish by nature. We're more concerned with our own preservation than with anybody else's. His example was this: if a man molests a neighbor's child, you're horrified, but don't do anything. If a man molests your child, you do something about it. "It's just too hard for us," Ryan said. "It isn't possible for us to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves."
1:51 AM, 5 December Couldn't help looking at the place the body was. The railing is dented quite a bit on the northbound side of the road. Work is boring and I like that about it, but I don't like how unreliable the computers are. Also, people who call from New York make me nervous - they're always in a hurry and often quite rude. I sat next to no one familiar, so work went by kind of slow. I'm right now trying to stay awake until 3:30 when my favorite radio program comes on. 12:54 AM, 6 December Today was my day off. I deposited my paycheck and bought Final Fantasy 9. Reruns of Buffy and Angel, though. 2:06 AM, 8 December At work today, I was called down to quality assurance. They listen in to my phone calls randomly and decide my bonus based on what they hear. I got low eighties, so there's room for improvement. I don't mind that my calls are being monitored or that there are security cameras on me all day long. As paranoid as I am, it comes as a relief to know that I'm really being watched. 1:27 AM, 10 December Yesterday I met my supervisor for the first time. He doesn't officially start working here until tomorrow. So fooling around is about to come to an end. I'm thinking of becoming a firefighter. They work just two days a week because they have to be on call 24 hours a day. All I really want from my dream job is a lot of leisure time and with modern buildings being so fire proof, firefighting seems like the job with the most amount of free time. It would be exciting to put out fires and save lives. I wonder what kind of requirements they have. I got cussed at by a customer for the first time today. I say, "Due to the Holidays, it can be up to 48 hours until your phone gets activated." She says, "Thank you" and I say, "Thank you," and before hanging up, she says, "Fuck you too." Made me feel bad for a few minutes. I've been a loner at work lately. When I first come in, there's hardly anywhere to sit since everybody's working overtime to get money for Christmas, so I take whatever available seat I can get and as the day wears away and everybody gets up to leave, I just stay where I am instead of moving to a place where other people are. I did overhear Ryan telling someone that he's a Reverend in the Church of the SubGenius, which is apparently a for-profit religion in which you literally buy your way into heaven. You'll get salvation or triple your money back. He gave me the web address awhile ago, but I've been too lazy to type it in yet. 2:11 AM, 11 December First snow of the year that stuck around. Being Sunday and clear of traffic so late at night, I found much enjoyment running red lights and intentionally fish tailing down the street. I even did a 180 by accident turning a corner and later I pulled into a church parking lot to do some doughnuts. I'm still a kid, you see. After getting off work at half past midnight and spending half an hour convincing the truck to start up, I'm quite glad Wendy's is open until 2. Work was quite nice and leisurely. One caller, who said he was from FEMA, got had by a salesman who promised him immediate activation on his phones. The caller said our company will be hearing from the U.S. Government tomorrow. Met a cool chick today, Orivan. Talked with her a good part of the day since we get so few calls on Sundays. She's a return missionary and now goes to BYU, plus has a boyfriend., but still nice to talk to. Played Go Fish with her, another girl, and Jean, who's the office clown. 1:20 AM, 12 December A good day. We were in Q for the first four hours, so time went by quickly, then the last four hours were calm and leisurely, which was nice. Also, I figured out that if I take my final break just before my shift ends to warm up the truck and move it closer to the building, I can escape like a bandit in the night. It's once again Monday, and I will attempt to stay up past 3:30 when my favorite radio program comes on. 1:22 AM, 15 December Today work was way slow. I joked with one guy about how George W. Bush becoming President-elect threw the country into economic panic. A.C. passed a note to me asking if I was gay. I said I wasn't and she said she thought I might be because of how quiet and shy I am. Somebody left a Mountain Dew on my desk, nearly full, which was convenient since my throat got real dry as the day went on. I read an old New Yorker and tried to fall asleep, but couldn't quite do it. 1:27 AM, 16 December Picked up my paycheck. My supervisor called our group together and explained that since it was the law to take a lunch if you work over seven hours, those of us skipping lunch were not getting paid for the extra half hour we worked each day. "If you're not hungry, just take a nap in your car or something." Which is what I did. I laid down in the back seat and opened an eye occasionally to check the clock. Some nice R&B music on the radio, it's a type of music I don't listen to much, so I wasn't bored with it. Had a view of a skeletal tree waving in the wind. Dark clouds covered the sky except for the one bright spot where the moon was hiding. I work close to the airport, so I saw lots of airplanes floating by in front of the clouds, sometimes three in my view at once, with blue and red lights. Every time I see a plane I wish I was on it, traveling somewhere, anywhere, just to get out of this wage slave rut. I sat next to Orivan and Isaac today. Isaac was the guy I got paired with during my on the job training. Orivan is from Laos and speaks quite good English but seems not to have a full handle on it yet. She's putting together a scrapbook, cutting out photos and pasting them in this big book. She works on that as I read from the magazine I brought along. Occasionally, she'll be reminded of an event by a picture she is pasting, and she will suddenly start talking about it. I'll turn my attention to her and say a few words myself, but she'll just as suddenly become quiet and return to the scrapbook. Isaac is a student at the U interested in stem cell research. Since he's learned that I have a bachelor's in English, he wants me to read over his papers before he turns them in. I assume he's a return missionary since he speaks Portuguese fluently and has blonde hair. Today, good news. Casual day every day from now until the first of the year. The company Christmas party was tonight and since I had to work, I couldn't go, but they gave away free sandwiches, cookies, potato salad and soda pops in the cafeteria. I'd already spent my lunch napping in the truck, so I went down during one of my breaks and ate up real quick, stuffing the cookie in my mouth as I rode the elevator back up, hiding the soda since food and drink aren't allowed on the floor. Then after I'd settled in to my desk, my supervisor walked past me with a sandwich, exclaiming, "This is the best ham I've ever eaten." 2:09 AM, 18 December Another Sunday. Same routine. Any day I sit next to Jean is a good day. Today, he called a supervisor over and said, "Hey Derek. Come over here. I have a problem. I tried to get into this porn site and it says no access. What am I supposed to do?" Derek is used to these jokes. However, later in the day, Jean tried a joke on Nicole. "What should I do if a dealer wants to activate two separate phones?" She said, "Activate them. That's your job." Jean, pretending he had a customer on the line, said, "Okay, sir. I talked with my supervisor and she says I should transfer you." Nicole raised her voice and said, "I didn't say that. Do not transfer that customer." And it took him awhile to explain that he wasn't really on a call. Yesterday I was too tired to write. What happened was Jim got around to showing me the packet that disturbed Ryan. It was just about how constellations' and stars' names could be interpreted to refer to events in the Bible. Virgo = Virgin Mary and that sort of thing. Interesting, but hardly convincing. Jean greeted me today with "Jay. What's wrong. I know something's wrong." Which is how he always greets me. He then got interrupted by a call and I thought about what was wrong. I made a little list in my head. 1. I work at a cell phone company. I figured 5 would be the easiest to remedy, so I took off my shoes. Jean finished up his call and turned back to me. "I know something's wrong because you're still wearing your shoes." I said I wasn't and showed him that my shoes were off. 1:45 AM, 22 December I sat next to a girl named Sally today. Blonde hair down to her waist, quite beautiful, and she reminds me of me. How casual she acts. She takes off her shoes and wears the most adorable pink socks. She leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. She reads a New Yorker. We even got up to take a break at the same time. I heard her talking with someone and got the impression she's academically inclined. I really should have tried talking with her. I may not see her ever again. 2:12 PM, 25 December Last few days what happened? Nicole said she's sick of women since they make everything more complicated than it needs to be and announced to the office that she's now straight. This girl sitting next to me, after being chastised by my supervisor, told me she didn't like him because he told her what to do. She then added that she also hated him for being Asian (he's actually Tongan) and said she had good reason for hating Asians. I said that was too bad. She insisted she had a good reason. She said that she had a reoccurring dream as a child in which she saw an Asian man who suddenly caught fire. In the dream, she watched his skin melted off his body. Then, he started chasing her. Her mother explained to her that this dream meant she had been sexually molested as a child by an Asian, which she believes. All that was a couple days ago. Yesterday, Christmas Eve, in which nobody activated any phones making our presence ultimately useless, Nicole started telling everybody that she was pregnant. These guys next to me didn't believe her, so she invited them to feel her stomach. "That's not a baby, that's a beer belly," one of them said. Everybody could tell she was just sticking her stomach out. She went around asking people for money so that her baby could eat. "I have to feed my baby," she kept saying. When Derek asked how she could get pregnant, she explained that four months ago she was straight for a day and that's how it happened. She kept talking in baby voice about the baby inside her. Yesterday, I also met a nice guy. I was coming back from lunch, and after settling into my cubicle, I noticed he was the only other person left on the row. He flashed me a big bright smile. Teeth look like they're sparkling since he's wearing braces. I smile back and he holds out his hand. "My name's Simon." I shake his hand and introduce myself. As I detected an accent, I asked where he was from. Sudan. He worked in toxicology before here, so I wondered why he left that. He said the bad part about testing for drugs was that he had to handle urine all day. 1:24 AM, 26 December "First of all, I want to thank God. I also want to thank my mother. I'd like to thank my father as well. And most important of all, I want to thank YOU for calling Cell Phone Company. My name is Jean. How may I help you?" I can't believe they made me work all day Christmas. They sent me home early on Thanksgiving. I probably haven't even worked here long enough to qualify for holiday pay. Simon found me and sat next to me, so I might actually be making a friend here. I showed him my book of Dilbert cartoons, which he found confusing. I then asked what he was reading and he showed me a Banana Republic catalogue. "They give them to you for free," he said. He also had a woman's fashion magazine on his desk. They at least gave us a free meal. I usually catch a nap in the truck at lunch, but since it was free, I went down and had a turkey sandwich. I sat next to Jean, but he acted like he didn't know me. I guess because his friends were there. I felt real awkward sitting there and finished up my sandwich real quick. I went back to my desk and just read Dilbert. We didn't get any calls, so I forgot where I was and started feeling good again, but then I finished reading the book and had nothing to do. So I began to listen to everybody else's conversations. Some guys in front of me were talking about basketball. I heard Nicole talking about a blind date she was going on. Mary was affecting an English accent and saying all sorts of vulgar things. For example, after belching someone's name, she says, "That's stinky. Tastes like cum." Some people think she's been acting weird lately due to being pregnant, but she insists she acts weird all the time. I could hear Ryan far away saying something about Jim Morrison. One of the girls said someone once told her she had the voice for a phone sex hotline, which caused Mary to do an S and M routine in her fake accent. To which some guy responded, "Why would anyone get off on being hurt?" Nicole said something about the donkey show in Mexico. Ryan confirmed that such a thing existed. Someone said to him in a shocked voice, "Aren't you a reverend?" Mary then started talking about how her brother found a real life snuff film pushed back in a closet on the top shelf in an apartment he was renting. "He says it was a fake, but I could tell it was real. The girl was crying and the guys were shaking when they shoved the knife in her asshole." As I was driving home, I saw a dog amble across the intersection at the crosswalk. It was alone and I felt bad for it. Everywhere was closed and there were few other cars on the road. I imagined it was on its way home, though. One of those dogs that walks all the way across the country to find its owner again. 11:18 PM, 27 December Saw that movie Unbreakable. Not bad. Also finished reading the Bible. Ecclesiastes is my favorite. It's the Old Testament book most quoted from and reads like it was written by an atheist. I found a hopeful scripture for the New Year, Isaiah 65:17: "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind." 1:17 AM, 30 December A light fog hung over the office building when I came in today. A pretty good day. Got my paycheck, delighted to find a 300 dollar bonus. Not sure what it was for. Maybe a QA or attendance bonus. Isaac talked with me a bit. Asked me about Hoffman since I'd brought along a collection of his stories. He explained to me that he was talking to me because I was the quiet type and therefor likely to kill everybody one day, so he wanted me to think he was my friend. Sat next to a boy named Jeff yesterday. Didn't talk much with him, but he seemed to like me. I couldn't sit next to him today since that's where Isaac was. So I sat next to Jim. Talked religion most all the time. He pronounced Tao as toe, but at least he knows more about Christianity than the average Christian. He speaks religion with everyone, even customers on the phone. He gave me a modern translation of the New Testament. I saw he had half a dozen copies of this book, but asked anyway if he could spare to give me one. "I order these by the hundred" he told me. He's the king of corny jokes for sure. This one he told to a customer, "How do you catch a unique person? Unique up on him." By the time I left work, the fog was so thick, I couldn't see twenty feet in front of me. It was exciting to drive with just over one car space visibility, speeding into the unknown. Traffic lights looked like they hovered in the air since I couldn't see the poles they hung from. Jim read this to me from a paper he had: "The past is history. The future is mystery. Right now is a gift. That's why we call it the present." 1:27 AM, 1 January 2001 Rang in the New Year at work. Sat next to Jeff and chatted throughout the night. Not much of a conversationalist either of us. Fog was worse today. Barely see one car ahead at times. I got quite frightened at moments on the freeway. A car merging from the right and a car from the left changing lanes almost collided right in front of me. Some cars slowed down for the fog, others seemed to drive faster. Cops were out in force, trying to get the drunks off the roads. It was quite a sight to see cop lights suddenly light up in the midst of the fog, appearing out of nowhere. I could barely make out the exit signs on the side of the road. The most spectacular sight was the light rail. It's usually closed this time of night, but stayed open later for New Years. Those crossing rails suddenly lighting up and descending in the fog was real cool to see. I started feeling drunk about ten. I had to have a customer repeat a phone number to me half a dozen times and even then I didn't get it right, so I transferred him. At home, the drunk feeling continued. I felt a small amount of dissociation. Sounds were quieter than usual. For some reason, I have trouble hearing when I get drunk. I don't know what caused this feeling since I didn't drink anything. 2:44 AM, 2 January Nicole apparently got in trouble for looking at pictures of Angelina Jolie on the computer. I saw Jeff again today and talked with him some, but I didn't sit next to him since I was in a bit of an antisocial mood. I read my magazine, and since I had a dream a few nights ago in which I was an excellent drawer, I attempted to draw a picture of one of the advertisements in the magazine. Not very good, but I'm sure with ten years or so of practice, my people will start to look like people. 1:31 AM, 5 January I thought today would be bad since I slept in way late and spilled soup on myself, but when I got to work, everything went rather smoothly. Spent an hour on one call since it was something I couldn't handle myself and the other departments don't like to accept transfers. Other than that, I spent less then ten minutes on each call. 2:26 AM, 8 January Noticed, as I drove to work, that the railing that got dented from that car crash on Bangerter had been replaced with a new one. 1 March 2001 |
When I got off work, I didn't drive straight home. I drove up to the mountains and turned the radio up. Since there isn't much traffic on Sunday night, I was able to run several red lights, and drive at twice the speed limit. It felt good to be driving so fast after months of driving slow. I swerved between lanes while digging fries out of the bottom of the bag and trying to change stations while not spilling my drink. I was occasionally surprised by sudden sharp turns. I liked to turn my head around and drive while looking out the back window - everything getting further away. When I got on the freeway, I wanted to do a U-turn and drive the wrong way up the street. Nobody else was in sight, it would have been exhilarating, but I didn't. It's always exciting to break the rules, although driving fast on twisting roads is exciting for another reason too.