As promised, here is the lowdown on the geeksquad I've got working with me. (I am well aware that, as a goober tied into the whole temp agency thing, I also qualify as a geek, but fuck that shit: I am evilmister, and I ain't no geek. Fuckers.)
First, lemme explain the deal. I'm working as low man on the totem, hauling stuff off trucks and taking them to the second level of a major clothing/appliance/knickknack ripoff store; the store itself is undergoing
major renovations. While still being open to the public. Yes. Hordes of bluehairs toddle through the store on walkers, gocarts, oxygen masks and whatever else old people need to get mobile while guys like
me are roaming the aisles, lugging a thousand pounds worth of countertops on a
pallet jack. Them: 52 lbs with walker. Me: 1250 lbs with pallet jack and counters. Which do you think is easier to move out of the way, and which do you think is more destructive to the walls, freshly tiled floors, and newly carpeted merchandise aisles? I am personally responsible for the destruction of no less than two dozen tiles at a hundred bucks a pop and I can count at least four holes I've gouged into new drywall because these old fuckers can't move fast enough to save their lives. It's like they
want to die. The job itself is actually pretty fun, considering I've spent the last decade or so fucking around at countertops, dealing with gomers who've got no fucking clue what they want, and are under some sort of Evil Jedi mindfuck because they think that if
they yell louder, I will give them what they want. So yeah, I dig being a low-paid chump hauling shit around, because it's got the instant gratification of being able to point to 400 square feet of floor filled with shit that I personally carried around.
So that's the scoop, more or less. Store's open, people are laying tiles, laying carpeting, putting up drywall, installing cabinets and selling over-priced murch to bluehairs and people with more money than sense.
As to the cast and crew, I'll start with the main men: The Guys in Hard Hats. There are three of them. First, and almost always around, is
Round Hal. His name is Hal, and he's round. He's also only about five and a half feet tall. He's the go-between for us, The Retards Who Can't Keep Jobs, the truck drivers, and the folks in charge of specific departments in the chain. He is
supposed to have a map of the layout, with indications as to where everything goes, maps of what everything looks like, and where to find it all. He doesn't have the map on him all the time. He doesn't have the diagrams of the individual units either. He basically points to an empty spot and says "Put stuff there." We do so, until the Spastic Contractors get their collective panties in bunches and we are forced to move said stuff somewhere else. This happens between three and five times a day. Next comes
Bill. Bill is almost never around, but is the one who is actually in charge. He is also supposed to possess maps and diagrams, and is also a go-between. When he is around, he assists in the off loading of trucks, which is quite nice. But, he is almost never there, hiding, I suspect from the eighty-three million people who want to ask him questions, as he also seems to be in charge of everything that is actually happening every minute of the day. I personally know that he has stayed late every night to move shit around, which is commendible, if not grounds for immediate psychiatric evaluation. Last is
Jack, who I surmise is the
capo di tutti capo. I've seen him three times, and each time, it's like I'm seeing some kind of specter. He sticks around long enough to make me feel like I should be doing something else, and then leaves. None of them are around long enough to tell us what to do for more than 2 or 3 hours at a shake. When you are dealing with The Retards, this is kind of dangerous: unsupervised, we will sit around swapping bullshit stories and ogling the female employees to the point of harassment. These are my bosses, and I can't really fault them for not sticking around. They have a lot more to deal with than a bunch of Retards. They are building an entire store, for chrissakes, around a store that is still open.
The first in the Retard Squad is
Oldie. I call him Oldie because well, he's old, coming close to mid-fifties if his gray hair and wrinkles are any indication; if it was legal, I'd cut him open through the middle and count his rings. Brian is
always early. I shit you not. I show up at quarter to the hour to settle in, and this old fucker is already working. Since he is employed by a temp agency, I am forced to state that he is an alcoholic murderer who can't keep from drinking and killing, which is why he can't hold on to a job. His work ethics are that good. He avoids the rest of The Retards by eating his lunch in his car. I wish
I had a car to hide in.
Next up is
MiniSpaniard. As you guessed, he's short, he's Spanish and he's one baaaaaaaad motherf-Shut Your Mouth. Not a bad guy, all in all, willing to work, do his shit, and be amiable about it. He has done time, and he's only in his early twenties, and is undoubtedly working as a Retard because of his criminal record, which probably isn't that bad of a record. Probably only possession with intent to sell, if his mysteriously
glassy red eyes after prolonged bathroom breaks are any indication of his ...
habits. I like MiniSpaniard. He's OK in my book, but if the Man comes looking for the Dealer, I will kick his punk ass to the ground and claim my reward.
Then there's
"Look at that Sexy bitch!" He has
no concept of decorum. Granted, he's a Retard like the rest of us, but even a twitter-pated gomer should be able to realize that in a crowded shopping mall, you
don't shout shit at the top of your lungs, especially if it's "Look at those
tits!" or "I never liked Sushi before, but slide me some a' that raw tuna! You see her
ass, dude?". It is especially hilarious in the lunch room, because it is full of magazines like World Weekly Star, Style, People, Life and any other magazine that shows chicks like
Paris Hilton,
The Olsen Twins and
Lindsay Lohan in various styles of undress. The comments range from 'She's a dirty skank whore, but I'd for sure fuck her in the ass' to 'This sexy bitch would suck it out of my rod like there was no tomorrow'. This is in the
lunch room, which has
other people eating lunch. The place we're working has a large number of female employees. 'Nuff said? He also has done small time, and also suffers from mysterious doses of red-eye. I also like this guy, on account of he's on his way to becoming an EvilMister clone.
Next up is
Young Gomer with Ass Outside of Pants. He's maybe four and a half years old, if the soft headed look he has is any pointer to his age. I haven't seen him do much but look utterly confused and lost, and sometimes afraid, like he's maybe forgotten to take his rage suppressant pills. He hardly ever talks, but this is probably just to hide the fact that he has a third grade vocabulary. Sadly, I don't know much about Young Gomer, except for his allergies to work and fear of anything resembling exertion. As such, I can't really say if I like him or not, and I especially can't make too much fun of him. Oh yeah, I forgot. He really
does let his pants ride his ass. I can't figure out how he's managed not to kill himself on the worksite yet, cuz with his
Stanfield Plaids showing, the hem of his pantlegs are somewhere around the tips of his shoes. It's amazing, and if Roy doesn't make it back to showbiz, I'm certain
Siegfried'll find a replacement.
My absolute favorite is
Fucktard with Hat. Fucktard is, without a doubt, every employer's nightmare. He's a tub of goo (so'm I, but hey, kiss my ass. You want to read me being insulted, check elsewhere) who alternates between furious bursts of utter outrage at the slapdashery of the assignment to weird stories of girlfriend/fiancee and her cat. He is also a master at foremanship, and can tell any one of us who pauses for more than two seconds
exactly how the job should have been set up. This also makes him an expert in architecture (designing the building), a mastercraftsman (designing the counters and other utilities we are offloading, specifically in terms of durability and lightness), a god at shipping and receiving (coordinating the shipping of merchandise from back East to our location to avoid anything and everything that could possibly inconvenience him) and a Grandmaster of employee relations (keeping everyone from killing him stone cold dead). It is hard for me to understand why he's working in a temp agency, he's so skilled. He has told me stories about getting in the face of employers, about the office cunt who manipulated an entire office full of people into getting him fired, about the guy on the shift before him who never did anything and made it look like
he was in the wrong. It's quite a litany, and in all of them, he is never, ever, never wrong. The best time was when, with two hours left on our shift, he told us he remembered exactly where Round Hal wanted us to put the counters we were offloading, and that was what we did. An hour into the offloading, Round Hal showed up and told us that we were putting them in the wrong spot. Under his breath, Fucktard told me that he was only getting 9.50$ an hour and shouldn't be expected to know where anything goes.
Come on, Fucktard! If yer gonna step up and try to take the reigns, admit when you've fucked everyone in the ass. We spent another forty-five minutes moving everything to where it belonged, and then were made to feel like Retards Magna Cum Laude because we didn't stay late to finish unloading. Hey, I may be a Retard, but I'm no sucker. I later found out that
Look at that Sexy Bitch told Round Hal that it was all Fucktard's fault. Yay, Look!
The
Spastic Contractors can be broken into a three distinct sub-groups. There are the
Tempermental Carpet-Layers, who really take carpeting too seriously. As they spend most of the time on their knees, crawling around and inhaling the fumes from potentially poisonous carpet glue, I can't blame them from being a little hacked off when Look at that Sexy Bitch uses a pallet jack as a scooter across freshly laid carpet (he does this on the tiles only, now, because of the better speed). Next on the block are the
Oblivious Electricians. They are found in two states; carrying ladders around and looking significantly at random spots on ceilings, walls, floors and drywall columns, or standing on the ladders, poking their fingers into snarls of wiring and muttering about covalences and other arcane shit. Since the Oblivious Electricians take up little space and don't get in our way, it's really hard to piss one of them off, although allowing a pallet jack full of odd-sized pallets to grab hold of a) a ladder, b) the extension cord, or c) their tools is one motherfuck of a good way to do it. Finally are the
Cranky Drywallers. They are cranky for a fuckload of reasons. As most of us know, drywall is the least durable substance on the planet. You can stick your fingers through it if you try hard enough. With the deadly combination of the Retards and their fucked-up pallet jacks, the Tempermental Carpet-Layers, and the non-threatening Carpenters moving shit all over everywhere and digging massive gouges out of freshly hung drywall, they have no hope of ever finishing their job. Especially when they read their own blueprints wrong and have to take down walls they've only just put up. That shit is fuckin' funny to me, which is why I'll probably remain a Retard forever.
I gave the
Mentally Unstable Tilers their own grouping, because they are the unhappiest group of people I've ever met next to my parents, who blame me for everything from the Black Plague to starving children. Their job is not a happy one. They can only tile
before carpet is laid, because it's a fundamentally messy job. Since this is the case, they cannot
protect the edges of tiles. This is ceramic tile, which, if anyone knows, can and will shatter like potato chips if given half a chance, and when the Retards are trying to ram a pallet jack carrying a thousand pound load over the small difference between concrete floor and tiles, you can only expect the obvious. The only thing harder than tiling is
untiling, cuz then you run the risk of breaking other tiles. Needless to say, they hate the Retards, who are responsible for at least 90% of the broken tiles. There was also an incident involving
Fucktard with Hat and a pallet jack, which I will cover now: equipmet like pallet jacks, dollies, and tools designed to make lives easier are very much in demand. They will disappear quicker than a bag of M&M's near a fat kid. Consequently, at least two of the Retards are permanently on the look-out for this kind of shit. Fucktard found an unused pallet jack, purportedly asked a number of different people if it was theirs, and allegedly got told 'take it' every time. We loaded this fucker up good and proper. with something like 3000 lbs of uber-heavy shit that took us a good half-hour to manhandle into place so it wouldn't fall off and squash a bluehair bargain hunter. At the freight elevator,
five Mentally Unstable Tilers show up, demanding the return of their pallet jack. I wasn't paying any attention of this, 'cuz I was playing with the freight elevator buttons and closed the doors right on their faces, which made me some kind of hero; I looked like King Cock in a Cockfight. Upstairs, the Tilers had somehow managed to warp time and space to get ahead of us, telling us once again the pallet jack was theirs. I had the feeling they wanted us to drop our shit right there in Men's shoes so they could move their own shit. All this time, Fucktard is ragging on about how he asked everyone in sight if he could use it, which is about as likely as men landing on the sun. The lead Tiler has decided that I am the ringleader of this merry band of Retards on account of my wicked burn with the freight doors, and looks like he really wants to hit me with something, but I persevere stoically. Five of the Retards are now lugging this monster of counters through the aisles (Oldie is downstairs, happy as a clam and busy as a beaver) with a Mentally Unstable Tiler escort, arguing loudly over ownership of a pallet jack clearly emblazoned with the name of the company I work for on the sides. The Mentally Unstable Tilers followed us all the way across the second floor to make sure, I guess, that we didn't, oh, I don't know,
run off with the fucking thing. A pallet jack in itself weighs at
least five hundred pounds, is made of solid metal, and is about as ergonimically designed as those eighty-thousand pound television sets from the 70's. Fucktard has continued on with his rant of deflection, adding on the fact that he is only paid $9.50 an hour, and shouldn't have to deal with this kind of fucking shit, if these fuckers could get their act together, then
his life would be so much easier. Or, if
he was in charge, things would've never gotten this way in the first place.
And that, so far, is my life!!
