Month: February 2023

What in the world does love got to do with a relationship that is literally toxic?

Well, you’ll just have to read on, my friend, read on…

“John would like to see you in the manager’s office…again.”

Say, do you remember that sh*t-job of counting cans and bags of frozen vegetables with the Crypt-Keeper that I talked about last time? You know, the one where I got into trouble because I dared to don a racially-dubious hairstyle? Yeah, that’s the one.

In that tale, I had basically pulled a “You can’t fire me ‘cuz I quit!” and actually made good on that promise two days later. Why would I do such I thing? Well, somebody had to stand up for Black people (and other People of Color) round the world who suffer persecution discrimination when they embrace the hairstyles of their culture. Can you believe that my boss, John, actually had the gall to tell me that I had to take out my dreadlocks or else? Or else what? Or else, he said, I couldn’t keeping doing inventory for whatever random grocery store had hired his crap-tastic company.

*Ahem*…Now that I have reminded you of all those facts, surely you must be wondering, “Wait! I thought our hero had quit…how is John asking to see him in his temporary office again? I thought his days of meddling with that fool were now days of yore?”

Well, as it turns out, I actually quit the first time because it was time to start another semester of college. But college semesters don’t last forever, and Christmas break had rolled around, so I decided to make a little extra fun-money and work for ol’ QIS again for 2 or 3 weeks.

And importantly, you know what happened during that fateful Fall semester of 2001? Uh…I mean besides 9/11? What happened was that my itch to have dreadlocks had been thoroughly scratched (both figuratively and literally–those things dang itchy!), and I had bittersweetly decided to bid my albino tarantula farewell.

And that is where find ourselves in the story…

“Hey El Jefe! Long time, no see! Now what’s all this hub-bub about? Word in the aisle has it that you wanted to see me?”

John somberly shut the door behind me before speaking.

“The HAIR?!? Are you kidding me? Did you learn nothing from last time?”

I was somewhat taken aback. This little pow-wow was about hair? My hair?!?

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on John! What are you talking about? I thought you would be pleased as a properly counted jar of pickles to see that I had cut my dreadlocks off. What gives?”

“Son, have you looked in the mirror lately? I can’t have you working public looking like that.”

Man, this follicly-challenged guy was going to bust my chops no matter what I did with my hair, wasn’t he?

…but to his point, I guess technically I hadn’t considered what John might think if I were to show up to work with…um…well…fuchsia? Red, maybe? No, no, I know: ‘orange’–show up with orange hair.

Okay, it was actually a bit complicated. You see, when I cut my beloved dreads off, I couldn’t just go back to being another boring ol’ vanilla-looking white guy. So what did I do? I popped on down to my local drugstore and bought a box of what was advertised as red hair dye.

Let’s just say that I got more than I had bargained for. Depending on the light, the time of day, and whether or not I had gel in my hair, one could have veritably described my hair color as red, fuchsia, pink, lavender, purple, light purple, orange, cherry, and/or cinnamon.

So that’s what John was going on about. Ah-hah! It all makes sense now…he just hates anything ‘cool’. What a ----- nerd.

“I’m going to have to personally drive you back to the hotel and you had better be blonde when it’s time to go to work in the morning.”

Talk about déjà vu. Just like last time, we were doing a multi-day stint far enough away from home that they had put up the whole inventorying crew in hotels–but this time it was Kansas City instead of Wichita.

However, this time John had caught me early enough in the day, and our hotel was far enough away, that he had no other choice but to load me up in his Subaru and drive me 45 minutes across town.

Dear lord, that was the longest and most awkward 45 minutes of my life. It would have been fine if it had been awkward silence, but noooo, yours truly doesn’t know how to handle silence, so I insisted on chatting the whole way.

Have you ever tried to make casual small-talk with a disapproving superior? I don’t recommend it. On top of that weird dynamic, it doesn’t help that…hmmm, how do I put this? Oh, I know: I’m sad to report that Balding John may very well have been The Least Interesting Man In The World…

“Hmm…the woman on this box of dye looks super-blonde…seems promising…”

While, I wasn’t exactly excited to get rid of my rad-looking hair, I was at least optimistic that it would be problem going back to blonde–and therefore returning to my paying job. I snatched up Platinum Blonde #7, and scurried to the CVS checkout counter, eager to get back to the hotel and get this whole thing over with.

*90 minutes later…*

“What a rip! I’ve been duped by false advertising–I mean, just look at me. I look nothing like the lady on the box!”

The random co-worker I was bunking with in the hotel kinda gave me the side-eye from across the room.

“What’s that you’re going on about?”

“I bought blonde hair dye, but this ain’t working worth crap! Now my hair has gone from red to pink.”

“Maybe you accidentally bought a bleaching product instead of a dye?” he suggested.

“Yeah, that must be it. You hold on…Ima run down to the CVS and be right back!”

*40 minutes later…*

“Okay, I think I got the right stuff now. You mind giving me a hand with this?”

“Yes. I mind. I’m trying to watch a football game here.” Did I mention this guy was a bit of an asshole?

“Fine. I’ll do it myself again!”

*55 minutes later…*

“Sh*t, it looks like I’ve been duped again!” I exclaimed after rinsing out the dye, having it let sit in my hair a little bit longer than the suggested time.

“I don’t know dude, I think light pink looks good on you.” The roommates sincerity was quite dubious.

“Aw, shut your pie-hole, you ass-face. You’re not helping any.”

“Well, John’s going to absolutely love your new look. Or, if you’re concerned he won’t, you can always try dying it again!”

Anyways, I could go on with dialogue like this, or I could cut more directly to the point. Turns out that I gotta learn a little life lesson that wintery day: did you know what there is no such thing as blonde hair day? It’s all bleach. Every last ----- product on the market that claims to be blond-ifying: bleach. Bleach. Bleach.

If I recall correctly, I know chemically treated my hair at least 3 times over the course of two days–though I think it might have been closer to 5. Five! Five bleach treatments–that can’t be good!

Let me tell ya, my hair was fried af. And the best part? I still wasn’t blonde. I had to argue with John to let me go back to working, in spite of my pinkish hair.

“Look, John, I’m pretty sure I’m developing scalp cancer with all the ----- bleach I’ve exposed it to. You gotta give me some credit for trying!”

“Hmm…I don’t know…”

“Dude, I know it’s technically still ‘pink’, but I don’t even have the benefit of it being punk-rock pink. It’s more like old-lady pink, or unintentionally effeminate pink. I don’t look cool. I look like a complete idiot. Please take pity on my soul!”

I’m pretty sure my pleas went something right along those lines. It must have worked too, because John finally relented and let me go back to work. Hooray.

Sure, I was going to be earning a sweet paycheck at the end of all of this, but at what cost?

Well, I’ll tell you ‘at what cost’: I would end up suffering the relentless ridicule of my peers and colleagues, for with such light pink tips–and eventually naturally blonde roots as well–you can only imagine what I looked like…

The point of the story is: I looked like a damned Valentine’s Bear. You know, the white ones with the lightest of pink tips? Yeah, I looked just like one of those.

Though that reminds me…Happy Semi-Late Valentine’s Day!

Ah, yes, therein lies this week’s true nugget of wisdom my friends: why suffer all those fools rushing in to your fave restaurant on the 14th or the weekend immediately preceding it? Be smart and celebrate V-Day a week later and I guarantee you that you will enjoy it ten times more.

Especially on account of the NFL switching to a 17-game regular season, and thereby pushing the Super Bowl back a week…right on top of Valentine’s time. You can’t help but wonder how many relationship disputes have arisen because of this inherent scheduling conflict. You know what? I’ll bet you the extended football season was a conspiracy put together by the American Association of Divorce Lawyers. Seriously, I would love to see the divorce statistics before and after that change was implemented.

But like I said, you can neatly side-step that whole marital fiasco by waiting a week or less to pop the cork on that pink champagne. (And no, that is not an overtly amorous euphemism…)

Content created on: 15/18 February 2023 (Weds/Sat)

If I’m being oppressed on the job because of my hair, then we agree my boss is being racist, right?

(P.S. We’re both white…)

“Wait, wait, wait–hold up. You think I look ‘unprofessional’?!? Have you ever looked at the guy you hired to supervise us?”

Maybe I wasn’t saying it out loud, but it was definitely what I was practically screaming in my head. John, the owner of the small inventorying company I was working for that summer, had called me into his temporary office at the back of the grocery store we were currently working, and he was more or less temporarily firing me.

“Go out there and look at that walking skeleton Greg, the guy you literally chose to be the most visible face of your company. He looks like the Crypt-Keeper a few days before he died!”

As I continued my internal rant, I couldn’t help but realizing that I was right–Greg’s resemblance to this guy was uncanny:

“Son, although you don’t work for this here fine grocery store, you have to understand that in the eyes of most customers, you do. And I just can’t have you out there on the floor counting cans looking like that.”

At this point, John had me worked up into a combination of livid and embarrassed. I was out there doing my job, when he had yanked me into his little lair, only to berate me for the style of my hair. Add that to the logically airtight case (in my head) positing that his right hand man was waaaay more publicly unpresentable than me.

This is the first of two points I need to expound upon: Greg, our supervisor. I first met him in an Arby’s, where Quality Inventory Services, Inc, decided to hold their interviews. I kid you not. Arby’s. Give me a break, though–I had moved back to Manhattan (KS) in the middle of the summer for reasons that are of no import right now, and I was desperate for some income. And do you know how hard it is to find somebody that is hiring in the middle of the summer in a college town? Well, besides Wendy’s–but they wanted somebody who would work during the school year too, and this was before I learned how to lie and tell them ‘Sure! I want to work here until I die!”

Anyways, myself and several other people from various walks of life (but all equally hard up for some cash), had gathered at this fine establishment to try to impress this semi-homeless looking guy with how fast we could punch numbers into a calculator. Okay, so the bar was pretty low for this company, but still…you would at least expect the guy to cut his fingernails, right?

Oh, and the one thing that he said that I remember all these years later was “Most people use filing cabinets and what not to keep track of their stuff. Me? I find that stuffing everything in my back pockets works best for me!”

And this is no exaggeration, either. This yellow-toothed dude was about 4 inches higher off his seat than he should have been as he sat across that Arby’s booth from me, all on account of the myriad–nay, plethora–of folded up pieces of paper that called his back pockets ‘home’.

Hey…did I mention that he had the exact same hair as the Crypt-Keeper? Oh, I did already? You saw the picture above, you say? Alright. Now you have a pretty complete picture of the man, the myth, the legend: Greg.

Now on to point #2: the gross imbalance of power. At the time of this conversation with John, it was the weekend before the fall semester of my junior year at K-State started up. We were in the middle of a 3-day job down in Wichita, and it was going to be my last one before calling it quits to focus on school and doing other, much funner, college stuff.

Normally, a day working for an inventory company would consist of waking up at 4:30 in the morning to go meet up in the Food4Less parking lot, and then all of us esteemed employees would pile into a company van and head out to wherever a severely under-inventoried Northeast Kansas grocery store might be located. After starting actual working around 6:30 or 7, we would work until 2 or 3 pm before piling up in the van again and commuting back to home base.

But, in this case, since we had 3 stores in Wichita to do, QIS instead put us up in hotels for a few nights, as opposed to making 3 arduous commutes back-to-back-to-back.

So, how do all these seemingly unnecessary details lead to a ‘gross imbalance of power’? Surely that’s what you’re wondering. Well, what that means is that I was basically an indentured servant to QIS.

No matter how badly I wanted to tell John to take his right-hand man’s greasy pinky fingernail and shove it where the sun don’t shine, I really couldn’t. Otherwise, I would find myself homeless and carless in Wichita, a good 44 hour walk¹Google Maps will back me up on this fact. back to my dorm!

So there I was, unable to protest or even stick up for myself, feeling like a kid who got called to the principal’s office for wearing too-baggy pants to school. I couldn’t say a dang word when John gave me the ultimatum:

“Here’s what we’re going to do: I’m going to take you back to the hotel, and you use the rest of the afternoon to undo what you’ve done to your hair, mmmkay? Then, if you look presentable in the morning, I’ll let you go ahead and work the other two days we’re here. Got that? Good.”

Oh, my dear Johnny-boy, you ----- racist simpleton. One does not simply “undo what I’ve done to my hair…”

“Umm…what time did you say you had to be at work? 5:15? Well we better get to working on your hair…*yawwwwwwn*”

Flashback to approximately 8 hours earlier, where we find our hero attempting to build a loft for his dorm room in the middle of the night. As bad of an idea as that sounds–at least when our hero has to be in a sh*tty company van in the Food4Less parking lot at 5:15 am–it’s made even worse when you consider the fact that yon hero had asked a fair maiden–we’ll call her ‘Em’–to do him a favor and style his hair before they all got swept up in the hub-bub of the new school year.

Okay, I suppose I’ll stop referring to myself, your noble and beloved protagonist, as ‘our hero’, mainly because it just gets so tedious telling (and hearing) a story in 4th-person.

As I was saying, Em was one of those female friends that were barely across the ‘acquaintance’ line, one you would feel comfortable with asking favors from that might keep her up all night. And not in a sexy, fun way.

In retrospect, it was probably bad enough that I had asked her to fix up my hair around midnight that night. Well, it wasn’t horrible of me to ask that–we were young college bucks and does, after all–but nonetheless, I could have been a bit more considerate of her time and sleep schedule.

Where it really went off the rails into ‘am I a horrible human being?’ territory was the fact that I said, ‘Hey, could you help me build this loft real quick before you get to my hair?’ Sometimes I seriously don’t know what is wrong with me.

Anyways, as you can imagine (and My Beautiful Bride can heartily attest to), is that my ability to estimate how long a given task might take to complete was wildly and widely inaccurate that night. If I recall correctly, we didn’t even get the loft fully built, abandoning it around 3:30 in attempt to tackle the task that sat atop my head.

“You did bring all the supplies I’ll need, right? *yawwwwwn*” Em wearily asked, with a slight quiver of hope in her voice that maybe, just maybe, I forgot and she could get out of this ill-advised favor.

“You bet I did! Look–I got a complete kit right here!” I had been waiting for this moment since the day I had Spanky Spankowich destroy what remained of his techni-color creation, allowing him to buzz my hair short enough to get rid of my multi-color tips and start growing my hair out with a clean slate.

That had been 9 months earlier. Now, like a child growing in its mother’s womb, my follicles had gestated long enough. Their moment of rebirth was at hand.

“Fine then…hand me the wax and let’s get this over with. *yawwwwwwnnnnnn*…”

Resigned to her fate in the moment, Em dutifully set to work, transforming my beautiful blonde bowl-cut into the head-turning locks I had dreamed about my whole adult life. Ninety minutes later, with just enough time to for a speed-limit-ignoring trip to the Food4Less, her masterpiece was finally complete.

“Ughhh…just let me go wash off my hands real quick and I’ll be right back,” she said as she scurried off to the restroom, leaving me there to admire myself in the mirror, thinking:

Em came back shortly, still trying to wipe the grease off her hands.

“So are you happy? Is this what you really wanted?”

“Yeah, man, this is pretty sweet. Thanks so much!”

“*yaawwwwwwwnnn* So am I free to go now?”

“Sure…go get yourself 2 hours of sleep, kid–you earned it.”

“Umm…whatever. Oh, before I go, you know I’m a true friend, right?” she said.

“You bet–especially after this!” I was so clueless as to where she was going with this, it was almost cute.

“Then, as a true friend, this might as well come from me before any one else says something.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Well, if I’m being honest…you should know that you look like you have an albino tarantula living on top of your head…”

The point of the story, kids, is that so-called ‘white dreadlocks’ will always and forever be a bad idea. Just don’t do it! No matter how fun you think it will be to culturally appropriate a laid-back, low-maintenance ‘lifestyle’, it will always always always be a ----- stupid idea in the end.

But, if you go against all the best learn-from-my-mistakes-kid life advice this blog (and just about anybody else you talk to) has to offer, I will wholly support you when some jack-ass boss of yours thinks your albino tarantula is somehow more offensive to grocery shoppers than the soon-to-be-deceased Crypt-Keeper, and that ----- fool tries to tell you to ‘go back to your hotel room and undo your filthy dreadlocks.’ You know what you do then? You sure as sh*t don’t cut off your locks–no! You’ve sacrificed so much already to get here! And of course you can’t ‘undo’ them. Does this clown even understand how dreads work? Probably not. In fact, he’s probably just jealous because he suffers from male-pattern baldness.

What you do is you tell John to suck it up for 2 more days, then you will literally be out of his hair (or at least where his hair used to be–hah!). Then you go back to your hotel room and convince your co-worker/roommate to walk to the nearby theatre an see the hit Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr. Bean) hit movie, Rat Race with you. Seriously, as dumb of a movie as it was, the two of us have never laughed harder in our lives.

And speaking of laughing way too hard at something incredibly stupid, I leave you with this comedian’s commentary on white dreadlocks that, by pure happenstance, came across my YouTube feed a few nights ago (warning: adult language)…

Content created on: 10/11 February 2023 (Fri/Sat)