| 1~14~00 |
| Facing up to a hectic Friday without enough time to get this
daily column typed and pasted on the web but my misguided dedication to
this thing keeps me doing it today anyway.
Woke up and immediately geared up to run off to the post office and mail out Naked Aggression videos, cds, and other odds and ends for Kirsten. There were only three others in line in front of me at the Post Office and two of them were already being helped. One was a chunky middle aged black woman who had to speak up about the red streaks dyed into the plump, late twenties, latino woman's hair. "How you do that?" she asked. "you have to bleach it out first?" Why the hell does every place have to be this way? You live in L.A., bitch! Haven't you ever had the opportunity to ask someone about the ins and outs of hair dying before you reached your 40th birthday? The hair dye girl answered in the affirmative, that yes she did have to bleach out the parts she was to dye red. "I always wondered how people with such dark hair could get colors like that in." said the not too bright non-hair dyed woman. One of the postal clerks looked like she wanted to be gunned out of her misery. I imagine working in this place and hearing such banal conversation all day long from slightly retarded customers must be aggravating. I try to be nice to the postal employees. Never say anything about price. No chit-chat. Do not ask about the job. Smile. say a meekly stated "thank you," and get the fuck out. The hair dye conversation went on another two to three minutes before the instigator of the conversation left. Ah, relief. Blessed silence except for the banter necessary to conduct the transactions of cash for postage. And then, the Latino girl picks up the thread of the old hair dye talk. She continues on about this one salon where she went to just get a streak and how much they charged her and that's why she does it herself now and... I felt deep sympathy for the harried looking postal gal who mustered up all her strength to respond with a friendly, "Oh yeah," or "Is that so?" I started to wonder if her job was actually more like hell than mine. I decided it most likely wasn't. I don't really want anybody to be more constantly miserable at work than I am. I'm not being altruistic when I say that. It's just that I wouldn't be able to wallow in the horrifying ritual that is my job with quite as much deep satisfaction if I truly knew that somebody had a rougher go of it each day at work than I did. And I did use the words "truly knew," which more or less means to me, "first hand encounter with that person while they are working." I've read my Upton Sinclair, okay? That's it for today. One more shift and I can enjoy the weekend. Keep your fingers crossed for me so I don't get mauled by a large mountain cat or sprayed by a skunk. These are my new occupational worries. More on that at a later time. |