BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Part 3 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Love At First Sight…

When last we left our intrepid blogger, he had fallen hard for an evil femme fatale, and was perilously close to being…

Oh, sorry… I sometimes have a flair for the dramatic and all… Part of that whole writer thing…So anyway, where was I? Oh yes…

And there I was… Hopelessly – and secretly – in love with this woman everyone had told me would chew me up, spit me out, and then grind her heels into my corpse just for spite while cackling madly and spitting on me for good measure –  All for no other reason than she was just that kind of psychobitch. And, to add even more insult to injury,  she would also cut out my liver and kidneys with a rusty letter opener just so she could cook them up and feed them to her cats.

These folks really and truly did have a bizarre view of this woman.

To this day, I’m still not entirely sure what she did to make these people, especially the men, be so damned afraid of her. All I can say is that if  it was because she did in fact tap-dance on someone’s head around there, (figuratively or literally, either one), that person most assuredly deserved it. Believe me, I worked with them and I had my own daydream moments about some of these individuals falling off a cliff,  simply disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle, or some other such demise, and not all of them were as bloodless as those I listed…

Besides, look at that picture… How could anyone think such horrible things about this woman? Yeah, okay, well admittedly there is a bit of a “dominatrixish” gleam in her eyes… Well, more than a bit, actually…more like a whole bunch… But, that’s okay.  I’ll admit to being afflicted with Joss Whedon Syndrome (JWS), meaning I happen to love strong female archetypes. However, some folks – men and women alike – find strong women intimidating, so maybe that was their issue. (shrug). Or, they could have just been assholes like I said at the outset, which is probably the more likely explanation in my opinion…

But rather than go there, let’s move on. Actually, this is the point where we sort of hit the Fast Forward / Scan button on the story. All manner of things happened in the weeks that followed, but they are a bit of a drudgery in many respects and a bit too personal to blog about in others. So, in order to get from point A to point B, I’ll toss in an abbreviated sort of synopsis here.

Begin story compression:

Due to an oversight, it seemed that a tech position actually was open with the company, but had not been advertised, nor had the management of the store responsible for doing the hiring been told. This was rectified when the district manager came through town for a visit. Of course, I waved my flag and upon proving my claim was immediately transferred to the tech center (my heart went pitter-pat for more than one reason at this point, let me tell you)… Unfortunately, the district manager didn’t consult E K about this change to her staff and since she was the “tech management” she wasn’t terribly happy about that fact. Soooo, I was pretty much viewed as an enemy my first couple of weeks there. In fact, I was even interrogated by her with condescending questions like, “Do you know how to do x y z?” Invariably, x y z was always something ridiculously simple,to me, at least, and something I had been doing for 10 years longer than anyone else on staff: things like soldering components, swapping motherboards, aligning disk drives, etc… Rather than take true offense, I would simply answer in the affirmative then set about proving myself by completing the task perfectly and in record time. (No, I’m not bragging here… just telling it like it was. You see, while I had years of experience, Kathy, Erin, and Phil, all three, were recent graduates of the electronics program from the local community college. Although they had degrees not a one of them had even a full year under their belt in the real world of electronics repair.  The truth was they were  all green enough to stick in the ground and sprout roots. I was a veteran tech, and to a large degree found this whole scenario amusing beyond belief…)

Of course, Kathy’s condescension really didn’t matter at that point because I had no other choice but to worship her from afar anyway, because you see, it turned out she was married. My heart sank upon that discovery, however, I contented myself with spending 8 hours out of each workday in the same zip code with her and reveled in the opportunities I had to converse with her too. What I didn’t realize at the time was that her marriage was already dashed upon the rocky shores, and that for all intents and purposes it was really all over except the paperwork.

Eventually I endeared myself to my co-workers. They came to realize I had experience in the field and developed a true respect for my skills as a tech, so it wasn’t unusual for me to fix something, then find whatever one of the other techs had been working on positioned on my desk so that I could fix it too. I became the go to guy… Kathy, being the manager, would spend most of her time doing paperwork, but did check up on us regularly… That was always interesting, because trust me, this young lady made it very hard to concentrate when “inspection time” rolled around. You see, she would observe from a close vantage point… and I mean close. More than enough to be ah… um… shall we say… a distraction. This often left me parked at my bench for a bit after she returned to her office, whether I had completed the repair or not. (yeah, I know, that was just the lust talking… but hey, love and lust go hand in hand at times…)

Still, I continued to work there and secretly worship her. I didn’t have a shrine in my home or anything like that, nor did I stalk her. I’m not insane… Well, at least I wasn’t back then… But, I did think about her quite a bit, and I’m willing to admit I allowed my imagination to run wild on several occasions. But that is for me to know and you to, well… not know.

Speaking of imagination running wild, in one of those “what was happening on this day in history” sort of veins, Wildest Dreams by The Moody Blues was in the Top 20 on the airwaves at that time… Kathy despised it, primarily because it was overplayed. Me, I reveled in it, but for reasons not yet revealed to her. Every time it came on she would wonder aloud why I liked it so much. I just smiled and went about my business of daydreaming…

Then, a fateful day came… The VP of ComputerTrend showed up at the tech center. Kathy happened to be out of the office on a service call, and at this particular juncture Erin and Phil had both been laid off. It was just E K and me handling the repairs. Well, we had seen the writing on the wall when the layoffs happened, so I wasn’t surprised when the VP announced that the whole company had filed Chapter 13, was going under, see ya’ later, good luck, now get the f*ck out… Having read the earlier writing, I had already been trolling for another job and luck had been on my side for some odd reason. Within a week I was again gainfully employed, this time as the service manager for a new computer company opening up in the Brentwood area of the county. One of my first acts as the service manager was to hire a staff. I called Kathy immediately and offered her a job as a technician. She accepted and now the tables had turned. She was no longer my boss, I was hers… or so I thought.

End story compression…

Yeah, no kidding… believe it or not, that was abbreviated…

It was while working with T C Service (Total Computer Service, in it’s first incarnation as a side company to a T C B C computer store… I mention this only because I believe T C Service still exists, but I know for a fact it was sold shortly after I quit, and that was less than a year after I started… yeah, another story entirely)… Anyway, it was while working overtime one night for T C Service that Kathy finally announced to me that her marriage was all but done, and would be done soon enough if all went well with paperwork, lawyers and such, and that she had developed more than a passing interest in taking our friendship beyond the platonic stage. We were the only two souls in the place that evening, and all was quiet when she rolled her chair over to my desk and offered up this bit of news in a soft, mellifluous tone.

Yes… Once again my knees were like Jello and my feet like wet bags of cement, even though I was sitting down at the time. I’m surprised my heart didn’t explode straight out of my chest, especially when she leaned forward and proceeded to give me a thorough tonsil examination to validate her statement. But, before you get the wrong idea, no clothes flew off, and no one found a bra or a sock hanging from a monitor or workbench the next day.  It  literally didn’t go any farther than a few passionate kisses… well, not for a while anyway.

Since her marriage was in the process of dissolution, (a process that took longer than expected as you will discover in a later installment), we began to date. At this particular juncture she still didn’t know all that much about my financial situation. Probably because I wasn’t one to discuss this sort of thing. I suppose it was just how I was brought up. Your business is your business and other people’s business is their business, so keep it that way.  Suffice it to say, I was still deep in debt, behind in my payments, and my salary still wasn’t what it had once been: meaning, I was falling farther and farther behind money-wise.

However, I felt a deep need to impress this woman. In all honesty I saw this as a last chance. You see, I had been in love once before and that particular young woman had broken my heart. Yeah, that happens to guys too. In fact, to quote Steve Martin from Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, “All dames are alike: they reach down your throat and they can grab your heart, pull it out and they throw it on the floor, step on it with their high heels, spit on it, shove it in the oven and cook the shit out of it. Then they slice it into little pieces, slam it on a hunk of toast, and serve it to you and then expect you to say, ‘Thanks, honey, it was delicious.'”

That was pretty much what happened to me on the first go around, and it was exactly what I feared would happen with E K if I allowed her to know how I truly felt. But I forced myself to take the chance… And like I said, I was going to do whatever it took to impress her, wine her, dine her, and capture her heart so that there wouldn’t be a repeat of what I’d dealt with before. Well, I couldn’t really afford to wine and dine her. I couldn’t afford to do the things for her I felt she deserved. I simply didn’t have the money.

But, I did have plastic, and she didn’t know that I didn’t have the money to back it up…

So, one Saturday, bright and early I picked her up. We had already planned to spend the day together, but hadn’t really made any actual “concrete plans” about what we would be doing, other than simply hanging out with one another. At least, that is what she thought. You see, I had a plan and it was definitely being set into motion… I had heard her mention a few days before that she really wanted to get her hair trimmed and spiral permed, so I decided if that was what she wanted, then that was what she would have.  I  drove us to the mall and waltzed her into a local salon, arranged an appointment, then waited patiently as they pampered her and spent a couple of hours on her coif. Once finished, I walked her over to the nearby Dillard’s where we did our own version of a scene from Pretty Woman, (well in advance of the actual movie I might add), and eventually walked out with a gorgeous red dress. Of course, this also meant a trip to the hosiery store around the corner for stockings, a side trip to Frederick’s for pretty underthings, and was rounded out by a visit to a shoe store as well: because what good is a new dress without new shoes to match, correct? And then that evening we went to a very nice, very expensive dinner… (Yes,  the photo above of E K assuming a Marlene Dietrich-esque pose was taken that evening, and she is wearing the very ensemble I just described… as  she also is in the come hither-esque photo at the top…)

I think I ended up dropping better than 500  bucks that day. Money I didn’t have, and couldn’t afford to rack up on my credit cards. But, when all was said and done Kathy felt like a princess and that was what I wanted for her. Of course, it was a gamble that nearly backfired when she found out how far in debt I was, and that I was struggling to dig myself out, but that I had spent all that money anyway (she is a very frugal individual)… Fortunately, luck was somehow on my side and she didn’t immediately dump me… She did, however take a pair of scissors hold of the plastic in my wallet lest I be tempted to repeat my silly behavior…

On a musical note yet again, by now there was another song riding the airwaves in the top echelon of hits. This time, my future bride actually liked it, overplayed as it was. I did too. Pete Cetera, undisputed master of the make out song and former front man for Chicago, was crooning “Glory of Love“, the theme from Karate Kid II which was one of the hot movies that summer. As sappy and sentimental as it sounds, then and now, that tune became the proverbial “our song” that set a tone for our future.

(On a side note – since I often refer to E K as the evil redhead, I should point out that indoor pictures rarely showed the hidden auburn in her hair.  As you can see above it simply appears brown… These days, however, her deeper red comes from the  “Clairol Spell” which I cast upon her tresses, by her request, at 6 week intervals.  And, just so you know, I have her permission to reveal that fact.)

So, anyway…

After a few months things at T C Service were taking a turn for the not so good. Mainly, the owner wasn’t on the same page as the rest of us who were living in the real world. So, serendipitously, E K and I became aware of a computer cabling company that was looking to get into the computer repair business as well. They had the money to back it, they just needed someone with the know how to run it.  We had a meeting with them and within weeks we said our goodbye’s to the craziness at T C Service and launched, MicroFix, Inc…

About this time, Kathy and I had just rented one side of a duplex here in the burbs in the shadow of an old radar tower known to locals as, “the golf ball,” and finally moved in together.  Just us, her three cats, and some secondhand furniture. Yeah, cohabitation.  The whole living in sin thing… But, by the same token, the location of MicroFix happened to be very close by, which made for a quick trip to and from work. I know, lame excuse… especially since we shared a bed, not just an apartment…

So, back to the cohabitation thing… Well, there were the obvious fringe benefits. Things like being able to see one another without burning any gas, or driving home late at night and getting only a couple of hours of sleep before having to get up and go to work again… Life was good.

It was sometime within those first few months dwelling in that duplex that I took her hands in mine and asked a very serious question…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: So I Have This Idea…

Part 2 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: What’s A Nice Girl Like You…

As I said previously, our story actually begins, for lack of a better starting point, on January 28, 1986, the fateful day of the Challenger disaster…

By January of 1986 I had been out of a job for nearly 6 months. My position with American Home Video Corporation, (aka AHVC and VideoConcepts™),  had come into jeopardy the moment the then Tandy Corporation, (aka Radio Shack®, and now Radio Shack Corporation), had concluded a buyout deal and taken over the company. I was in middle management and, as many of you well know those are usually the first jobs to be purged and refilled. It’s more economical for a corporation to hire in cheaper help and train them from scratch rather than to keep paying salaries that have increased throughout years of service and try to re-train people who are already set in their ways under the old regime. It makes sense from a business standpoint. It doesn’t make it any easier to swallow though…

And so, there I was. Jobless and pretty much penniless. You see, I had been caught up in the “credit craze” of the early 80’s. Sign here and get a $1000 credit line… No money down, no payments for 6 months, $2500 instant credit… Just show us a valid driver’s license and a current credit card, and you too can have a credit line with us…

Now, this wasn’t a HUGE problem when I had a job. I am truly a responsible person for the most part, (But, I do have my moments, just like anyone else). I pay my bills and have no desire to be beholding to anyone for any longer than I absolutely must… However, since I had been caught up in the craze, I was single, had a great place to live where the rent was cheap, (see previous blog “There I was, Sitting By The Pool…” January 23, 2009), I had overextended myself. A new car, (because I desperately needed one), was the biggie, but then there were a lot of toys… Video camera, TV’s, Stereo, Computer Gadgets… I could go on and on… With income, I could pay my bills and have some pocket money. Without income, my savings dried up very fast, and unemployment simply didn’t meet the basic needs. I started falling behind in my bills, collectors were calling, and I wasn’t having much luck in the “finding a job” department.

While I had been in Sales/Sales Management with my most recent job, I had also kept my finger in the electronics repair end of things. That was really my first love… well, second actually, because writing is my first… and it was something I was very good at doing. However, the job market for techs was a bit depressed at the time, so I had taken the sales position with AHVC. Well, here I was a couple of years and a handful of months later, and the job market for techs hadn’t seemed to become any better. So, I was looking for either one – tech or sales, anything would do, although I preferred tech.

Well, I finally received a callback on my resume… The company was known as Crazy Dave’s ComputerTrend. (I just looked for some info about them on the net so I could provide a link, but didn’t find much of anything, probably because they went under a long, long time ago.) In a nutshell, ComputerTrend was a Midwestern chain of discount computer resellers. What we called them back in the day was a “computer whore”… What that meant was they undercut everyone. They even sold systems below cost in order to increase volume and make up the profit on the back end with  high margin accessories. They had radio commercials that sounded like an advertisement for a monster truck rally… Literally… An artificially excited voice screaming about the great deals you could get on MacIntosh computers, IBM computers, Epson printers, and so on… Their catch phrase, believe it or not, was – voice one: “But how much is it?” excited voice 2: “It’s cheaper than a toaster!”

Yeah, a toaster. I have no idea, so don’t ask me. The only thing we ever called a toaster in the computer biz were some of the old external drives, and back then they weren’t exactly cheap.

So, obviously, ComputerTrend wasn’t my first choice in jobs, but by this time I was desperate. The bill collectors were starting to get nasty, and I was willing to take just about anything involving a paycheck, even though said paycheck was likely to be, and definitely was, far, far less than I had been making before…

Moving on, the day came for my scheduled interview, January 28, 1986.  I was set up to be at the Olive Road location around noon that day. I rolled out of bed early, went through my normal routine, showered,  futzed about with a B B S I was running at the time, got dressed for the interview, then kicked back in front of the TV with a cup of coffee to watch the space shuttle launch.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with my love of the space program, I was born on 2/20/62 – the day John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. His Mercury space capsule was christened Friendship 7, and legend has it I came very close to being named John Glenn Sellars. At any rate, the space program has always held a special interest for me.

Well, quite obviously the rest of that shuttle launch is sad history… Roughly 73 seconds into the flight an “O” ring failed and Challenger disintegrated, killing the seven crew members and plummeted bit by bit into the Atlantic ocean. I watched, like countless others, in abject horror as the scene played out before me on the screen of a 27 inch JVC TV / Monitor, (I remember that particular detail because it had been purchased from my previous place of employment)…

Then came the words, “Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink… We have a report from the Flight Dynamics Officer that the vehicle has exploded.”

I was devastated. At that point I literally considered calling the ComputerTrend Store and seeing if I could reschedule my job interview. I know, that sounds a bit melodramatic, even to me. But, at the time I was in a state of shock, as were many others. And being such an avid follower of the space program, the disaster hit me very hard.

However, I also had a sense of responsibility. I knew I needed to restart my income, and soon. The job market had been softer than a marshmallow in July and I realized I couldn’t risk losing this opportunity. Little did I know it was about to become a life changing opportunity in more ways than simply a paycheck.

I gathered myself, spoke to a few folks on the phone who were just as shocked as I at what had happened with the Shuttle, then donned a tweed sport coat and headed out for my interview. I did, however, make an obvious geek statement: I wore a black armband. Fortunately, the interviewer watched the news and was enough of a geek himself  to appreciate it.

As stated earlier, what I really wanted was a tech position, but they didn’t have one. So, I interviewed for a floor sales position. While I had the necessary qualifications for the job, I was later told that what clinched it for me was my tech background. Some of the veteran sales folk at the store had already heard about my resume, and were all about having a “personal tech” on staff with them. You see, the St. Louis tech center for ComputerTrend serviced three separate stores, and while it was actually located just across the parking lot from the Olive Road location, the techs there had their hands full already.

So now, I was gainfully employed. Well, as gainfully as I could be under the circumstances…

Two weeks into my new job, life took yet another turn. I was finally able to shake loose from the other salespeople who had me doing tech support for their clients as well as configuring the hardware they had sold. I needed to sell something myself if I was going to make anything besides base draw salary. So, I worked the floor and almost immediately  sold a system.  I wrote it up and arranged for the customer to take delivery the next day since he wanted a custom configuration. Then I set my schedule so that I could visit the tech center the next morning. You see, the tech center wasn’t just where the repairs took place… It was also the warehouse, and I needed to obtain the components I had just sold in order to put them together.

Now, I have to add in a side note here: I had been told all about the tech center when I started on my first day. As it happened, there was a young lady working there named Erin. All of the men at the store were constantly panting over her, and rightly so. She was a good looking blonde with an ample chest. She was also an absolute sweetheart… Therefore, since I was male the other guys included me in their tellings of lustful fantasies over this young woman. I can still remember hearing repeatedly, “Just wait until you see Erin…” Well, I did. She came by the store a few times, and I had occasion to go by the tech center a few times, myself… However, I didn’t have the same reaction to her as the rest of the men, not because she wasn’t perfectly lovely, because she was, but, she simply didn’t affect me the way she did the rest of them.

Well, as it happened, I also knew there were more folks over at the tech center besides Erin. There was a man by the name of Phil, and I had the opportunity to meet him as well. Very nice guy. But, there was also another woman by the name of Kathy – she was the manager. We had not yet crossed paths because she was either out sick or on vacation whenever I happened to be over at the tech center. So, since I was hoping to eventually snag a position as a tech,  I asked the salespeople at the store about her. Their response was, “Dude, watch out for Kathy…  She’s a real bitch…” Thing is, they were serious…

Okay, they had worked with her, I hadn’t, so I took them at their word. Obviously this Kathy person was someone I needed to give a wide berth if I valued job, life, and limb…

Back to the story…

I arrived at the store early that day so I could run across the lot and pick up the components I needed for the sale I had made the evening before. Now understand, we are talking in terms of a large shopping center so it wasn’t right next door or anything,  therefore I drove my car over in order to be able to load up the boxes and take them back to the store proper. I entered the foyer of the tech center which had a wall blocking the windows so that you couldn’t see into the back area where the techs were working and stock was stored, a bit of a security measure I suppose. Proceeding inward I rounded the corner in hopes of seeing Phil or maybe even Erin, since I already knew them… Besides, I really didn’t want to come face to face with this psychotic, misanthropic bitch named Kathy. I had enough to worry about with bill collectors and the like breathing down my neck, so I didn’t need a manager type to decide she hated me and get me fired.

But, when I made the turn and looked up from picking my way through stacks of boxes, there was no Phil or Erin in sight. What met my eyes, however, was an absolute vision…Yeah, be warned, this is where it gets Hallmark Channel™ sappy, because I remember it as vividly as if it was a color picture hanging on the wall in front of my face right this very minute…

There, perched on a stool in front of a tech bench, and working on an I T T Xtra P C Compatible C P U, was this petite woman. She had shoulder length, brown hair that held just a minor hint of auburn when the light caught it just so.  Her complexion was a pale ivory, with a few freckles here and there. She was wearing a white blouse, a black and red horizontally striped button down sweater, a black skirt with a hemline that came to just above her knees, and black leather, mid-heeled pumps. Her legs were crossed casually and ladylike. She had a tech manual open on one side of the C P U while wielding a screwdriver in her hand. She turned slowly and regarded me with a flat, “Yeah, what the f*ck do you want?” kind of expression tweaking her delicate features.

She was, no doubt in my mind, the Kathy Monster I had been warned to avoid.

But, much like my reaction to Erin, I had a completely different take than the other folks about this petite dynamo. I did not wet my pants and flee from the tech center as had been predicted by the veterans… No… I stood there and began to sweat as my heart started pounding in my ears. My knees felt like Jello and my feet felt like bags of wet cement. I know I began talking, but I couldn’t possibly tell you what I said… I suspect it was something on the order of incoherent babbling because the Kathy Monster simply sat there staring at me like I had lost my mind… Eventually, I managed to get myself together and pick up the items I had come to retrieve, all the while having a hell of a time taking my eyes off this woman. I think I even tripped and stumbled once or twice, effectively making myself look like an even bigger idiot than I already had with my nonsensical blithering.

By the time I returned to my car with the components, and was preparing to shuttle them back over to the store, my heart still had not settled. It was bouncing around inside my head, and blood was rushing in my ears like whitewater rapids… I felt lightheaded, and even giddy with excitement. I think I sat in the driver’s seat and glazed over for several minutes… After a healthy measure spent trying to make myself stop hyperventilating, I asked aloud this simple question:

“What the f*ck is wrong with you, Sellars?”

I didn’t have to wait for an answer because it was already sitting on my shoulder, bludgeoning me in an attempt to get my attention. In that moment it became crystal clear…

I had just fallen in love.

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT:  Mahwage: Money I Don’t Have…