You Can't Fire Me
Amicable splits and goblin breakfasts
When I was freshly home in New Philadelphia, Ohio after dropping out of college, I took a job in a call center because I’d just been trained on the dish tank at a restaurant by a middle-aged man and it had led to an existential crisis. My reward for the hubris it took to think I was too good for kitchen work at nineteen was to find out what call center jobs were like. I thought it was an office job because I got to bring in a coffee mug from home and wear button-up shirts.
This particular boiler room, run by a notorious northeast Ohio conman, sold fake jewelry via cold calls to people dumb, lonely or befuddled enough to have bought fake jewelry via cold calls already. After mailing them catalogs full of gaudy crap “personally selected” by a fictitious company spokesman, we called them and laid a script on them about how that same chairman had just come back from a buying trip to Europe to specifically insist they be offered first dibs on this new silver-plated herringbone chain, or whatever.
You’re either a natural carny at a job like that, or your sense of shame gradually swallows you whole like a seed pod and suffocates you. I lasted three weeks. One Saturday, with no prospects on the horizon, I clocked in knowing it was my final day in that repurposed bank branch, no matter what else happened.
I’d never quit a job in a premeditated fashion before, and I found the concept exhilarating. We had a skeleton crew doing weekend afternoon calls, and I nearly gave a supervisor an aneurysm by talking to a sweet confused old lady in Canada for 45 minutes with no intention of selling her anything. I impulsively asked the hottest girl in the building* out to lunch, took her to Taco Bell, told her I wasn’t coming back and gave her a big hug before we parted ways.
(This, for me at nineteen, was roughly equivalent to getting to third base with a cheerleader on the fifty-yard line during the homecoming game after shooting the opposing quarterback with a bazooka.)
I had a glimmer of that old feeling yesterday when I woke up unwillingly at 3:30am for the last show of the year at a spot that didn’t really work out for me. Not the same skeevy vibe at all – it’s a nice place, with great people — but the turnout just wasn’t justifying the drive and the early wake-up call. And that went double when I was staring at the ceiling two hours before the alarm.
I was yawning uncontrollably before I even hit the turnpike, so I knew it was gonna be that kind of day. I had spent a good bit of time restocking the boxes after great shows the weekend before, so I knew if things didn’t go well, it wasn’t a me issue. But I also know myself enough to know that I’m likely to forget that basic fact thirty minutes into a slow day. I resolved to give myself grace, no matter how much my internal monologue tried to talk me out of it.
I loaded in and set up, sat down in the camp chair I actually remembered to bring, and waited for doors to open. At some point, I realized they already had, and we just didn’t have any customers. This was the third of three events at this venue, and I hadn’t thought the first show was any great shakes, but the other two made me long for the bustling aisles of that glorious debut.
I finally decided I was going to get breakfast, and I made my way up front to the tavern and restaurant part of the building, where a DJ was spinning and day drinkers were already wrecking some brunch. I placed an order for a $13 breakfast burrito, headed back to my table to wait, only to find people gathering around my unmanned booth. Of course.
It took almost 40 minutes to get back to the bar for my food, not because I was crushing it in sales, but because every browser needed extra time, or wanted to chat, or decided to just really linger over every crate before wandering off to look at jewelry or paintings. It was fine – I was just tired and hungry. I got my food back to my spot, took a bite, looked up, and made eye contact with a stranger, as I sat hunched over my sloppy burrito like a goblin caught devouring a small forest animal.
I’m sure a couple of my bites didn’t end up that way, but if I had a normal moment with that meal, I don’t recall it. By the end of it, any enjoyment I had in what was actually a pretty tasty burrito was long gone, replaced by vexation. I got back to the job at hand.
People at this thing tend to be nice, but there just weren’t enough of them, and it seemed like some vendors had pulled out, so they perhaps felt inclined to spend even longer dawdling over the CDs because they had less overall stuff to look at. By noon or so, barring a mass influx of a busload of record-starved millionaires on a thrifting safari, I knew this was probably my last time here.
I decided to have a beer, because nothing makes more sense when you’re two hours from home and hauling a vanload of your inventory around than something to make you more tired. I added ten bucks to my tab for a plastic cup of some strawberry concoction with a coupla gnats pre-installed, and settled in to wait for the end of the day.
The entire parking lot had been roped off for outside vendors (who I wish godspeed, now and in the future, for setting up and standing outside for a day like the one I had, only in 90-degree heat). Once the clusterfuck of loadout began, it became clear that the easiest option was going to be to just trundle each dolly-load of boxes out the front door and across the street to where I’d found a spot. I was packed up by 3:30, my shirt sweated through, my head pounding.
I had one quick stop to make. My brother-in-law, who lives about 20 minutes from this venue, has been keeping an eye out for used music buys local to him, and just that week he’d picked up around 1200 CDs for me. The seller had packed them into Dollar General merchandise totes, the 21st-century version of the milk crate (complete with impotent “do not steal” verbiage printed on the side), and those fit snugly on top of the existing inventory as I turned my overloaded chariot, its out-of-date struts protesting a little, westward toward home.
I made it back without incident and without rest stops, and even unloaded the van immediately, so my records didn’t sit in the heat too long, but by then, I was the kind of tired that required a two-hour nap before I could eat dinner. I cracked open one of the Dollar General tubs and was pleasantly surprised to find some out-of-print Bee Gees reissues (you read that correctly) currently selling for $20-25 each, but I passed back out before getting too far into the new treasures.
It feels vaguely wrong to compare leaving that venue today with walking out of a soulless and morally void call center job, and I stress that I like the place and the people. I wish the events had drawn more folks, because I’d like to go back. But I don’t have a lot of life experiences filed away where I consciously left something because it wasn’t working out, as opposed to being tossed out by the scruff of the neck. All things being equal, I could have used those three weekend days more productively elsewhere, and I will next year.
Quitting instead of being fired is actually kind of a flex, one the rest of you probably didn’t need half a century to figure out. And quitting because it’s the best and sanest option, and not because you’re crashing out or hung over or in some dipshit predicament of your own making? That almost feels adult.
A month without shows kicks off today, and if the fates allow, I’m gonna let it kick off some time close to lunchtime, after quite a bit of restorative sleep and an unperceived breakfast in my own cozy house.
* Not only was she a vision of early 1990s mallrat beauty (her hair looked wet even when it wasn’t, and her spray tan was flawless), she had a voice like honey and could sell the devil’s balls to a Jesuit. I sometimes got in trouble for ignoring my own list to just listen to her work in an adjoining cubicle, not because I had the hots for her, but because once she zeroed in on a target, they simply could not resist handing over their credit card information. She thought it was funny and cute, and would cherry-pick her daily lists to only call the male prospects. At least one customer proposed to her over the phone on the first call.
I wonder what she’s doing now? Hopefully using her powers of persuasion for good.