special days

My nephew celebrated his fourth birthday yesterday. Presents with bright colored wrapping paper were stacked in the living room. Music streamed from the stereo speakers, a playlist created by my nephew which included all his favorite songs...Barbara Ann, by the Beach Boys, a few Sesame Street tunes, and a song by Miley Cyrus. Even at four, Miley songs seem to seep into one's head.

And my nephew was in total bliss. Wrapping paper got ripped off of the packages at tornado-like speed, and with each new toy his eyes simply got wider and wider. It was as if he had been deprived of toys for years. A previous toy-junkie that decided one day to take 12 steps backward and rediscover his one true vice.

My sister had baked a dinosaur-shaped cake for him, my nephew having formed a fascination with all things dinosaur. And the cake was devoured with the same enthusiasm that the toys were opened with. Flurries of sprinkles surrounded him as he licked the icing off of a rather large section of T-Rex's tail.

Later in the day, after most of the guests had departed, I sat with my sister and nephew around the kitchen table...my sister and I sipping stale coffee and my nephew enjoying yet another small slice of cake; a piece of T-Rex's nose this time.

He popped a small, blue sprinkle into his mouth...eating his sprinkles like a connoisseur, enjoying them one sprinkle at a time. He sat and became quite reflective, as if contemplating some of life's great mysteries.

“Mom,” he stated. “I think I'd like to have another birthday party tomorrow.”

“Honey, birthdays are very special days that only happen once a year,” she told him.

He seemed to think about this for a few seconds before responding. “Well tomorrow is a special day too.”

“Oh,” my sister asked, “and what day is tomorrow?”

“Monday!” he exclaimed.

“Dear, Mondays aren't special days,” she replied.

He looked crestfallen upon hearing this, but was soon absorbed in the remainder of his cake...seemingly having forgotten the unspecialness of Mondays.

My sister was right, of course. And sadly, he would learn soon enough that, rather than being special, Mondays were downright horrible days.

Although, if you could fill your Mondays with presents and cake, while it wouldn't completely erase their terribleness, it would certainly make them more bearable.

the start of my successful future

After having read that successful people buy a new pair of shoes three or four times each year, I felt that my old pair should be retired. Sad as this was, having worn the same shoes for the past six years, I was certain that success wouldn’t find me until new shoes were obtained.

Having gone so long without purchasing shoes, I wasn’t even too sure where to get them. Did Wal-Mart sell shoes? Did Sears? Or should I just get a cheap pair of Buster Brown shoes…though I wasn’t certain that they even made shoes anymore. Who knew that shoe shopping would be so difficult?

In a shoe-induced fog, I ended up at Macy’s and was soon the proud owner of a new pair of black leather, oxford shoes. I had a sales call scheduled for the following day and this, I thought, would be the perfect opportunity to wear my new shoes and usher in my new age-of-success.

I arrived at my appointment early the next morning, clad in my new shoes. Vince, my boss, has determined that all of our big accounts will be handled by Lenny…our inept sales manager…which is why I was visiting a small little company in a seedy part of town. The company was housed in a decrepit building which was also home to an attorney and a fitness equipment supplier. According to a large banner attached to the chain link fence surrounding the parking lot, there were several units for lease inside the building, though I couldn’t imagine why any company would choose to make this their home.

I parked and headed toward the front door. As I walked underneath the awning, I felt a sharp pain in my right arm. I paused, curious as to why I had suddenly developed this malady. And as I stood pondering this, I felt two sharp, stinging pains in my left arm and one on my neck. Suddenly I became aware that several wasps were swarming around me and that a large hive sat directly above my head on the underside of the awning I had just passed underneath.

I started swatting madly with the brochures I was carrying as I made a mad dash to the front door. Once I was safely inside the lobby, I assessed the damage…which amounted to five wasp stings and a total of four colored brochures that had been dropped as I raced into the building.

Having never been stung by any wasps before, I had no idea if I was allergic to them and anxiously waited to see if I would swell up and stop breathing. As the elevator doors slid open, I stepped inside and pressed the button for the third floor, relieved to find that I could still breathe and wasn’t swelling up in size. This, I reasoned, was an incredibly painful way to find out that one is not allergic to wasp stings.

I exited onto the third floor and started off down the hall. Approaching the door, I took a deep breath, readying myself for the start of my newfound successful future, and walked inside.

The secretary looked up as I entered and, noticing the expanding welts on my arms and neck, said, “Good heavens! What happened to you?”

I explained my unfortunate encounter with the wasps. “You mean you entered on the Fourth Avenue side? Oh, we never use that entrance,” she told me. “When you leave, use the doors to the rear parking lot. I’m glad you told me about this, though, so I can alert maintenance. I’d hate for somebody that works in the building to get stung!”

Obviously for those of us non-building workers, getting stung was entirely acceptable.

“So what can I do for you?” she asked.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Walsh,” I told her.

“Well this just isn’t your lucky day now, is it?” she responded. “Mr. Walsh left an hour ago. He must have forgotten that he had a meeting scheduled for today.”

I left a business card with her and took the stairwell down to the rear entrance that she had recommended. I exited the building and crossed through a small grassy divide that was littered with fast food wrappers and empty bottles that ran along side the chain link fence, inside of which sat my car.

I opened my car door, started the engine, and rested my head against the steering wheel when I noticed the distinct odor of dog poop wafting in the air. Glancing down at my feet, I saw that a rather large dog dropping now decorated the bottom of my new leather oxford.

I stepped back outside and tried to scrape off as much poop as possible onto the asphalt parking lot. Glaring down at my shoes…shoes that certainly hadn’t provided any promise that success would be forthcoming…I said to them, “I hope you realize that this is all your fault.”

and somehow we stay in business

We assembled in the conference room for a ‘working lunch’, which usually means that we the staff will get reamed out over free pizza and pop. As Vince, our boss, plopped four greasy slices onto a thin paper plate for himself he said, “While our sales have been sluggish and we really need to step it up, that’s not the point of the meeting today.”

Which was a surprise since every meeting we have always focuses on our sluggish sales and how we all need to start performing.

“No,” he continued, “today I wanted to take an opportunity to recognize ten years of outstanding service by a true superstar, our very own Lenny!”

The rest of us stopped in mid-bite and glanced at each other. Slowly, since we sensed that it was expected of us, we put our slices of pizza down and gave Lenny a very half-hearted smattering of applause.

Last year, in recognition of his ninth year of employment, Lenny had been promoted to Sales Manager, a position that didn’t exist prior to this. This year, he got a watch, on the back of which was inscribed, ‘10 years and counting!’

After being moved up in title to ‘Sales Manager’, I was demoted to a sales support position…meaning that Lenny began the manager of a sales staff that consisted of one…himself. Only recently have I been moved back into a full-time sales position. Stephanie, a recent college graduate, was hired to fill my old position as Lenny’s ‘support’ staff. Three others were hired before her and each quit after a week, meaning that I was continually being re-demoted. I wasn’t confident that she was going to remain with the company any longer than her predecessors had.

“Thanks Vince,” Lenny said as he slipped the watch around his wrist and hoisted his pants back up over the massive girth of his waist. “You know,” he told us, “everything I know about sales I learned from this man right here!”

“Tell them about that great sales call you had last week,” Vince said as he slapped Lenny on the back.

“Well, I’m at this company,” Lenny began, “and I give a great sales pitch and can tell that the guy is ready to buy. But then he says to me, ‘your product looks fine, but I just don’t have any money.”

“Which is a common objection,” Vince interjected. “But just listen to how Lenny handled it!”

“So I decided to play dumb and say to the guy, ‘No money? So you mean you’re going out of business?’ Of course they aren’t!” Lenny laughs. “So the guy admits that aren’t going out of business. There’s money, he tells me, but their budget is already spent for this year.”

“See how Lenny handled that?” Vince asked all of us seated around the table.

We all gave each other blank stares, unsure what Lenny had proved in his handling of the situation.

“So did they buy something?” Stephanie asked in a timid voice.

Having heard this same story from Lenny three times in the past week, I already knew the answer.

“No,” Lenny said. “But he assured me that next year they would.”

So by catching the guy in a lie…one which he told Lenny only as a nice way of saying, ‘we’re not interested’…Lenny extracted from him a promise to buy next year. Not that this does anyone any good this year. And I have a strong suspicion that they won’t be buying anything from Lenny next year either.

As I sat there with the beginnings of heartburn working its way through my chest…more from Lenny’s story than the pizza…I wondered how, with a teacher like Vince, our company hadn’t gone out of business long ago.

reality is simply too 'real'

My friend Jim’s house is unremarkable in every way. It has only three rooms, the ceilings are all sagging, and the basement is constantly in varied states of dampness. In truth, the term ‘unremarkable’ is simply a nice way of saying ‘barely livable’. But for one night each year, Jim’s place becomes the spot where everyone wants to convene…because its location provides an exceptional view of the city’s fireworks each Fourth of July.

Granted, these are not downtown fireworks…majestic, booming displays of pyrotechnic genius…but rather suburban fireworks set off from the mall parking lot. But Jim’s fabulous view of the mall parking lot, which isn’t nearly as scenic during other times of the year, make his place the standard Fourth of July get-together spot. Plus, there’s not nearly as much traffic as there would be if heading downtown.

We spilled onto the street along with Jim’s neighbors, setting out lawn chairs and blankets, in preparation of the festivities. Kids ran from yard to yard, chasing each other with sparklers and trying to catch fireflies as we pulled out a few beers from a cooler and passed around a bag of pretzels.

As the sky grew darker, the first firework exploded in the evening air to the standard chorus of ‘oohs’ and a smattering of applause. Within minutes, however, a band of smoke had formed in the sky. You could see the flare shoot up, hear the boom, but could only witness the bottom portion of the resulting firework…leaving your imagination to fill in what the obscured top half looked like.

It was a humid night and I sat there wondering if this had something to do with the smog-like band that had settled directly over where the firework display was taking place. Nearby, I heard a young kid sum up this meteorological oddity, however, by saying, “Mom, this stinks! Fireworks look way cooler on computer games than they do out here!”

And as I sat watching the remainder of the show…the bottom portion of all the fireworks...I had to admit that the kid had a point.

Reality would be much better if it was created by computer programmers.

a darker shade of pasty white

I've given up on any self-improvement activities that require actual exercise. So in an effort to achieve self-improvement with the least amount of work possible, I've decided to finally jump on the band wagon and try the tanning bed solution. Besides, I figured, darker colors are supposed to be slimming. So, even if I'm unable to get thinner in a 'real' sense, I could tan and appear thinner in a 'fake' sense. All in all, it seemed like a fool-proof plan...not considering the increased potential for skin cancer, that is.

With towel in hand, I headed out to a nearby tanning salon. I signed up for a 'summer six-pack special' of tanning bed time, feeling that a half-dozen 20 minute sessions would be more than enough to give me a tan dark enough to produce the slimming effects that I was looking for. And once my credit card was swiped, I headed toward an open room.

I closed the door, adjusted the fan, and found a radio station that I felt would be optimal toward my tan achievement. I undressed, briefly considering a full-body, commando style tan session, but decided to keep my skivvies in place. I wasn't sure what rays were going to be shot out toward me once inside the tanning bed, but felt that certain private areas would best be kept shielded from them...not that a thin layer of cotton would provide much protection, but it was better than nothing, I figured.

I carefully wiped down the tanning bed, set the timer, and settled in, ready to bake and emerge a nice shade of toasty brown. But as I lay there, I realized that I had completely forgotten to get those little plastic glasses that true tan-bedders wear. Would my eyes be safe, I wondered? Would they sizzle inside my head like little eggs in boiling water, leaving me with hard boiled eyeballs? Or would I gain some type of superhuman x-ray vision? Or was I perhaps being a bit over-dramatic? Was a 20 minute, one time tanning bed session enough to ruin my retinas? I doubted that it would, but made a mental note to buy some proper tanning eyewear before returning for the second session.

I settled back in but began to wonder if I had wiped off the tanning bed properly. I mean, potentially hundreds of people lay in this thing every week...many of which probably lay here naked. In the same bed that I was currently laying in. Here I was, laying in a tanning booth that many naked people had lain before me, and the only protection I had was a thin spray from a bottle found atop the paper towel dispenser. How much liquid was needed to properly kill all of these naked people germs that had been left behind, I wondered? And could I really trust that the stuff the tanning salon owners put into the bottle was adequate enough to kill all these naked person germs? Maybe they watered the stuff down to save on their tanning bed cleaner costs.

This thought worried me, and soon after I could feel all the millions of tiny bacteria from countless naked people crawling all over me...as if they had all been laying in wait for me to come in and begin construction on hundreds of little bacteria suburbs all over my body. My skin was crawling as I imagined them driving in their little bacteria cars to and from their little bacteria shopping malls. It was all simply too much to bear, so I jumped up from the tanning bed. The session had lasted all of 45 seconds.

I quickly toweled off all the bacteria, sending their economic boom into a sudden depression in the process, and glanced in the mirror to see if any results were visible from my first tanning bed experience. I still looked pretty pale, but with the proper amount of squinting I looked a slightly darker shade of pasty white. Not nearly enough, however, to produce a slimming effect.

And with tans now being out of the question, I now plan on purchasing several black T-shirts.