Telemarketing pt 2

At first I went after the quirkiest jobs I could find. I figured at the time why the hell not, and in those early stages of the job search you feel like you have the luxury to be picky. There was this opening in the Blue Man Group's band. The Blue Man Group is a popular performance art show that originated in New York, featuring a rotating cast of three stony faced, silent bald guys dressed in black, whose heads and hands are painted gleaming, cobalt blue. Their show was interspersed with live music performances by the Blue Man Band.

The Blue Man Band needed and electronic zither player. I'd seen them once for free because a friend had been working as an usher at the theater. I closed my eyes and pictured the band playing in the loft above the stage, in the dark, illuminated only by black lights hidden from view. Two pairs of neon orange drumsticks arced over lime green voodoo skullfaces; shadowy demons whose glowing metallic bones strummed on oddly shaped yield-sign-yellow guitars writhed to rhythms somehow both moody and up-beat. Esoteric electrical devices bleeping and blooping along the perimeter. Nowhere in my memory could I locate something that might be called a 'zither.' I figured they made it up, and so my chances of playing it were just as good as anyone else's.

This is the letter I sent to them, along with my resume, which detailed the long list of call center jobs trailing behind me:

My name is Patrick van Slee and I'm a very good musician. I have no idea what an "electronic zither" is, but I want to play it for your band. I like to play in the dark under a black light, so that won't be a problem. Give me a call, and you won't be disappointed.

The Unified Theory of Everything

There used to be a time
When everwhere around me
I saw mystery
And at night,
When I dreamed,
I was like a spellbound detective
Sorting through clues
That manifested themselves to me as impossible landscapes
Of vivid color
And sensation.

But that was before I figured out
The Unified Theory of Everything
And now
I see
The motivation
Behind everything that happens to me
And the dry logic
Soaks up the mystery
Without solving it

Even now,
As I write this,
I'm performing a sort of experiment;
But like a baby
That touches its own reflection
In a still pool of water,
I distort
That which I seek to understand
By the sham attempt

Telemarketing pt 1

SO it was a couple of summers ago and I was just out of my first semester back into college. I'd worked for SBC for a couple of years up until then and I had some money saved up, so I hadn't had to work during the spring semester. But now I needed a JOB.
I poured through the classifieds in the Chicago Reader. Most of the listings offered what the job market always seems to have available- serving jobs for new food service places, legal assistants, and gobs of call centers for in- and out-bound telemarketing.
I hate call centers, in fact swore I would avoid them like moldy sausage for the rest of my life. I can't stand talking on the phone, for one thing. And those places have a way of turning everything you do while you're on the clock into a percentage value that can mathematically be translated into their profit equations, because you are jacked into their telephone computer system at all times. Thus can they monitor every single minute of your day with a guy surrounded by computer screens who sends you pop-up messages to go an have a chat with the manager. Things like going off-script, forgetting to say the company name multiple times, and even leaving your workstation to go take a piss become a number representing profit loss. I once had a supervisor sneak after me and follow me into the bathroom.

CELEBRITIES' LIVES ARE NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS

Dream Ageein

It was cool, I was hanging from this window, trying to figure out how I was going to escape from these army guys who were chasing after me. I look down and the face of the building is brown marble, doesn't look like I can get a foothold- there are lots of angles and crevices but they look just a bit too sheer for me to sneak my foot in. Just then a man in a white shirt and a black tie finds me and closes the window without saying anything, confident that I've chosen my own form of execution. I dangle there for awhile, look down again, start to get scared, but then decide to slide down as gently as I can when I notice that the building tilts in an unusual way- I spit to make sure, to get a sense of the angel of the building with respect to the vertical pull of gravity, but the wind makes my spit arc as it falls, which tells me squat. I slide down anyway and whatta y'know! There is a very comfortable balcony conveniently located just below my feet somehow, and I drop myself into and smile. It's a wide balcony made of old, grey, weathered stone, cold to the touch because it's in the shade, pocked and pitted from acid rain and spotted with black dots of mold. There are thick columns that I can walk around, situated like crowded statues. I walk around them, marveling at the contrast of comfort between hanging around on this neat balcony and hanging on for dear life, dangling from a window. I'm feeling pretty safe here, guessing that the man and his army people are through with me, but then just as I think this to myself I remember just how thorough professional soldier-type people are, and I start to worry that they know about this sweet spot of mine... And then a whole bunch of these army guys come pouring through this big sliding glass door out onto the balcony and I try to hide behind one of the columns, even sort of walking around it to obscure myself from them as they walk closer but there are way too many of them, and I give myself up, walk out of cover with my hands up. One of the army guys points this huge machine gun at me right away but i'm like "No, Look!" with my hands, emphasizing that I've given myself up, and he looks really angry but I see he's not going to shoot me after all, which I don't really understand because didn't they just want me dead? I mean, the whole shutting the window thing, leaving me to plummet thirty stories to my death? But the Tie Guy isn't there, and the army guy with the machine gun walks around me and the other army guys sort of file back in through the sliding glass door again, really slowly. And the the machine gun guy puts his arm around my neck from behind and fumbles around with something, probably those plastic zip cuffs, and I sort of take this very deliberate step backwards and hook him around his neck and right arm and grab his right hand and point the machine gun at the other army men with my free arm, and I make him pull the trigger, shooting all of the army guys as they try to run back out onto the balcony. They come charging in like maniacs but my aim is straight and I shoot them all to death while my army guy struggles for control of the gun.