Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut (7 page)

Authors: Jill Kargman

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Essays, #Humor, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Satire

BOOK: Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut

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I know, I know: I’m not the first gal who
detested
her boss and had nightmares for years about fetching coffee with just the right ratio of skim milk to java. But I am one of the proud few who’ve had a tape dispenser thrown at her head. No, people, not the clear plastic Scotch roll; I’m talking the office-supply-style, weighted, pull-’n’-rip desktop kind. During college, I’d had internships at
Harper’s Bazaar
and MTV and the now defunct
Mademoiselle
magazine, where I actually worked for Kate Spade, who was the nicest person I’d ever met, let alone worked for, so the bar had been raised pretty fucking high. Then came Richard Sinnott, accessories director at
Bazaar
under Liz Tilberis, who is a comic genius. Richard and I cackled the hours away, hit gay bars, and even experimented with online shenanigans when the Internet started. Holy shit, that makes me sound super old. “Back in ye olde days, before there was any Internet . . .”

Anyway, I was twenty-one and my first job out of college was as an assistant at a pop culture magazine; I’d be allowed to write certain blurbs and “front of book” articles now and again. At first it seemed like a dream job; in fact I was reminded by the head of HR that “thousands of kids would kill for this job” and that $18,000 was “really generous” considering that “quite frankly, people would pay us to work here.”

Lies. Give ’em a week and they’d have jumped out the fucking window. Did I mention there was no lunch hour? Oh no, that was too postal workery. “We all work through lunch and maybe take a ten-minute break,” I was told. So, wait, like, no hour to myself to get an eyebrow wax and proper meal? “This is a magazine. We could fill your job with any number of people who would
kill
to work through lunch.” The result was ten pounds gained. I’d starve all day and then get out at ten at night and sic myself on a
huge
dinner. Which I subsequently learned was how the Japanese make sumo wrestlers so fucking fat. They fast and then pound a massive buffet and crash, all those calories on their asses and in donut rolls. Great. That would be me. Without the black flappy diaper thing, but still. Not good. I had one friend, in another department, who was equally miserable, but the others around me were all my superiors.

Technically, I had three bosses. One woman, two guys. The woman would routinely call people retards and storm in enveloped in a beige cloud of cigarette smoke and farts. I went to work with my heart pounding every day. After only a few weeks, I started to cry in the bathroom. This was a soul-draining experience that went on for twenty months, generally in the afternoons after a verbal beating.

It all began with the cheese Danish. But not just any cheese Danish—the almighty, the mack daddy, the pooh-bah, the grandmommy of all cheese danii: a Danish from Dean & Deluca on Prince Street. Each morning I was sent to fetch Her Majesty a cheese Danish. And one at lunch. And one at four or five
p.m
. I swear, people, if she collapsed and dropped dead and the autopsy people sliced her open, cheese Danish stuffing would just ooze out. Too gross. Add two packs of cigarettes a day, nine espressos, and lack of hygiene, and you’ve got what I call B cubed: bad breath, bad BO, bad box.

Now, you know that the shit’s bad when I tell you that she wasn’t even the worst one. Her beeyotch butt boy looked like a Gaston-esque caricature of a ripped Chelsea queen, black turtleneck and black Helmut Lang pants daily, like
Sprockets
but without the Nazi accent. But make no mistake: he ran the joint Gestapo-style. There was a strict no-food policy. I wasn’t exactly sure why, until our gorgeous loft space had a visitor. From the order Rodentia. A small rat darted down the long hallway and I levitated onto my desk
screaming
. No doubt the critter was lured by the aroma of fresh-baked piping-hot cheese Danish, and he strutted down the gray carpet by my desk. Chaos ensued. Shrieks were heard around the office and a photo editor dropped a pile of folders and bolted, papering the floor with outtakes of Bruce Weber shot next to half-naked boys with water spritzed on their chests.

Exterminators were called and that was the end of
Ratatouille
. It was around this time that, realizing my thigh circumference was approaching hula hoop girth, I decided I needed to start sneaking in a healthy small lunch or snack. I couldn’t slave for twelve hours working up the appetite of a T. rex and then stuff face
avec
two bread baskets before the apps were even served.

I had a bag of baby carrots in my top drawer, next to the paper clips and stapler. When no one was looking, I’d crunch one with super-slow chews and silently swallow. This worked for a few weeks. Then one day, holding a telltale carrot stump, I was caught red-handed. Or I guess orange-handed.

My boss’s shadow loomed over me. When I looked up, his face was contorted as if the rage boiling inside him would blast through his nostrils, ears, and eye sockets, sending his eyeballs flying all around the room like those bright rubber ones in the twenty-five-cent supermarket dispensers. He then walked off.

Later in the day, I went to pee and came back to my desk to find a note. It was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of standard white paper crisply folded in half with a crease that was obviously pressed with some sort of object like a CD case or a knife handle. It was then stapled around the entire border, with the little silver staples making a thin metal line around the three sides.

I pried open the Fort Knox memo and found the following.

Jill:

It was very curious to see you eating food at your desk. Especially because when we had the rodent problem, you were the one who screamed the loudest. How interesting, then, that you choose to eat in the office . . .

B.

I mean . . .
insane
! Yeah, I’m so sure it was
my
fault. Gee, I’m just certain it had
nothing whatsoever
to do with the
CHEESE DANISH CRUMBS ALL OVER THE FUCKING FLOOR.

A couple months later, I was fact-checking a David Bowie article and found an error on the final final pass at the eleventh hour. Seriously, it was eleven
p.m
. and we were all exhausted and wanted to ship the damn issue. I went into a senior staff meeting and said we had to make a last-minute change, which meant we’d be late to newsstand. My boss picked up her tape dispenser and threw it. At me. It hit my head, and while I had a Snoopy moment where I thought I saw flying Woodstocks tweeting in a circle around my wounded noggin, I was fine. No lawsuits, though I probably could have sued for any number of things, including mental torture.

I decided I needed to pick a date. A distant magical endpoint, a dot of light far away I could reach out toward and use to pull myself through the muck, like Andy Dufresne escaping Shawshank through a river of doody, but it’s worth it to get to the rain and crane shot on the other side. I needed to figure out what my three football fields would be—another year? No, fuck no. Nine months? Okay, nine months.

Christmas was approaching and the whole office was invited out to a sit-down holiday lunch. We arrived at a nearby restaurant to find that the editor and publisher were only “stopping by” for a total of fifteen minutes—they didn’t drink or eat and bolted when we had our appetizers cleared. When we came back to our desks each of us had a red rectangular envelope stuck into our keyboards with gold script that read: “Thank You!”

In between the “thank” and the “you” was an oval. In the oval was Benjamin Franklin’s face. Wait . . . WTF? Was this . . . a doorman’s envelope? It was.

“What the hell is this?” I said, opening it to find a $100 bill.

“Oh, it’s our tip. It’s not really enough to be a bonus,” replied my coworker, whose name was Jil but with one
l
.

She looked at my blank face.

“Yeah, I know, weak.” She shrugged. “We can go buy ourselves a sweater at Banana Republic.”

I decided nine months would become six. Six months I could do. I gave my notice on my birthday and never looked back. I was free! I was leaving for a job as a copywriter at Bertelsmann Music Group and couldn’t have been happier to bail. I think I left Road Runner skid marks on the way out.

When I got to my gleaming new offices and nice boss, I was in shock. At 4:59
p.m.
everyone’s coats were on and the elevators were jammed with a mass exodus. My second day, I hovered in my boss’s door.

“Um, h-hi,” I stammered after he’d hung up his phone. “Um, I wanted to see if I could um quickly pop out for a few minutes to grab something to eat?”

He looked at me like I had just parked my spaceship in Times Square. “Why don’t you take your lunch hour?”

I looked at him in a daze . . . hour . . . Hour?
Hour!
I had a lunch hour! Yee-
haw
! I was in heaven. No matter what I had to endure—including one schmuck who always had me redo things when he’d originally said he wanted the opposite (and also he wore a bolo tie; not sure which was worse)—I always knew I had an hour that was mine to recharge my batteries. In the end, though, it turned out that office life was not for
moi
. I bailed for the greener pastures of writing solo, and while lonely sometimes, it’s sure better than fetching cheese Danishes and being called retarded. Life’s just too damn short.

Obsessed

Dannon coffee yogurt

Woody Allen movies

Nine Inch Nails

Edward Gorey books

Tim Burton’s drawings

The sound of billiard balls clacking

The half-opened popcorn kernels at the bottom of the bucket

Fat toddler feet

Stories from doctor friends about nasty-ass ER people (à la the four-hundred-pound woman who had half a tuna sandwich in one of her fat folds, et al.) and teratomas (Google it, if you dare)