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About Me

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Springfield, Missouri, United States
I’m in my mid-30s and still trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. Most of my interests do not exactly come with a reasonable expectation of financial success, things such as artwork and fiction writing. I’ve been married to a delightful, attractive woman for five years, and, thankfully, neither of us wants to have children, so we can look forward to adult vacations, sleeping late, and disposable income. We do have two dogs, two chinchillas, a gerbil, and three chickens. Only the chickens seem to be pulling their weight vis-à-vis contributions to the household other than excrement.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Ultimate Pop-In







3/27/07


Do any of you out there in reader-land have the same, random person popping up in your life over and over again? It seems like the casting director for the Universe is just running out of character actors in the story of my life, because he’s started recycling the same person over and over every few years, and her name is Erin, though I’m not sure that’s how you spell it. She could, of course, be conducting the most lackluster and subtle stalking job the world has ever seen, but I have my doubts, as she’s actually quite attractive and seems not even marginally interested in conversing with me. What I find even more terrifying is the idea that she thinks I’m a huge cosmic joke, preceding her everywhere she goes like something out of the Twilight Zone.

I first met Erin in the summer of ’99, when we both started working customer service at the First USA credit card company, which became Bank One and is now owned by Chase. (If any of you click on that First USA link, you may want to consider whether you’re the most boring person on the planet.) We worked together for about six months before natural attrition took her. I succumbed to same about another six months after that.* As you might understand, I never expected to see her again. Or, if I did, it would be in some random bar where we’d exchange awkward “I know you enough to speak to, but we have nothing in common” greetings, and of course I’d creep her out with my drunken advances; case closed.

I worked at the worst job I’ve ever had** (packing live fish) for a few months, then started up at Southwester Bell, which became SBC and is now AT&T. Customer service jobs had been tainted forever from the year I worked at First USA (also, I hate people) so I got the job fully intending to quit once the ludicrously long and well-paid training period was over. One day, out on a smoke break, whom do I see outside but Erin taking her own cancer stick. It seems she was in the training class that had been hired just behind mine. Small world, huh? Her presence did not yet smack of something sinister going on behind the ebon folds of reality, just a happy coincidence.

Finally the day came when I had to “get on the phones” and I promptly stopped pursuing that avenue of employment. After a nice, long hiatus from the rat race I eventually got the job I have now in 2001. Around 2003 I had pretty much forgotten Erin ever existed, that is until for reasons which elude me at the moment, some friends and I went to Dennis’ Place, a local semi-countrified pool hall with karaoke. And who should be not only working there but waiting on our table but Erin. I believe something tickled my brainstem at that encounter, but after five or six 7&7s I vaguely recall clumsily pawing a card with my number into her hand before stumbling out into the night. Thankfully she didn’t call yours (creepy) truly, as I had no sober interest in this perfectly nice human being.

Fast forward to 2005 and some friends and I are going out again. Guess who’s the cousin of one of them, in some convoluted, backwards way? Yeah. Erin. This has become officially weird. Thankfully I don’t make another whiskey-soaked pass at her, as I’m now sort of afraid she’s after my organs.

Yesterday. For some time I had been suspecting it, but yesterday I had a confirmed sighting; Erin is indeed working across the street at some furniture warehouse or something. I saw her leaving yesterday when I was out on a break and I would like to take this opportunity to give the Universe the finger. My life is perpetuated by the laziest screenwriter ever. No longer freaked, now I’m flat-out horrified. Clearly one of us has to go.

Wouldn’t that be fucked up to pick up the paper and read “Small Local Man Stabs Blond; Drunkenly Mutters Something About Lazy Universe,”?








* Around the Jett household we refer to the time after I quit First USA as The Dark Period for reasons which would be apparent if you’d known how I lived at the time. Think “early caveman” without all the bothersome hygiene or social skills. This is a swath of time which definitely deserves its own blog, if not several, in the near future.


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