A Fairy Tale Ending for
a Working Class Princess, or HEY
by
Jenn Onofrio
WANTED: Your glossy Polaroid taped to this
wall.
Every morning as I gear myself up for my day’s
meaningless existence, I can’t help but to check in with
the crappy display of regality that stands twenty feet away
from me: the Employee of the Month plaque. Admittedly, it’s
a miserable excuse for a corporate pat-on-the-back. We’re
talking wooden plaque made at John Q’s Trophy Shop stuck
with a standard issue Polaroid photo of the lucky moron.
I despise the Employee of the Month program. It’s
such the rich white man’s way of trying to make me feel
like I’m progressive -- like I’m maybe something
of significance in the Darwinian scheme. All it really amounts
to is mind games, a false sense of hope and, for some, a teaser
at the comforts of security.
Have you ever known an Employee of the Month?
They’re stupid people. Numb. Psychotic. They’ll
do whatever you say and agree with whatever you think -- most
of them don’t make more than thirty thousand a year. They’re
complacent, slow, and ill-educated.
But if you spend your waking life gluing together
the gaps in "the man's" grandiose World Take-Over
scheme, shouldn't it eventually amount to something?
I work as a towel girl in a yoga studio, and not
just any yoga studio but a Bikram yoga studio, where each client
is merciless to the heat and humidity of classes offered at
105 degrees Fahrenheit. These classes produce a prodigious amount
of sweat, distributed into a towel, which I collect. I don’t
even make money at this place, I just wash towels and scrub
mats so that I can take classes for free.
I worked as a sales girl at a high end makeup/lotion
retailer on Fifth Avenue. I made a collective three hundred
taxable dollars there before my name began to disappear from
the schedules posting in the back room. (I was later informed
that this came as a result of my “antics”--my sales
pitching that certain products were guaranteed remedies for
brain cancer, leprosy, anemia… I was bored.)
I have played receptionist at a P/R firm, a vaporizer
manufacturing company, a publishing house responsible for those
widely-solicited and down-home-favorite recipe cards, and a
company of which I am not sure the nature of their business--someplace
on 35th Street. I played office bitch for a magazine, which
basically entailed me surfing the internet all day long while
pretending to be busy. Free coffee, sixteen dollars an hour.
Fuzzy, gray cubicle.
I was an extra on Law & Order: SVU, playing
a Slovakian Passerby. It gave me border-line frostbite on my
cheeks and a corporate-catered breakfast sandwich.
I was a spokesperson for a line of Scooby Doo
games, inadvertently dressed as the red-headed Daphne and fed
disgusting cold cuts and old potato salad for a week (the week
of the NYC blizzard, mind you). I spent a week smiling and Vanna
Whiting it up in front of a teal colored display so some suit-wearing
salespeople could pass by with their superstore retail clients
and ask me not just once or twice if I'd like to go out for
a drink.
I was a waitress for all of two weeks at a miserable
SoHo restaurant named after--how CLEVER--the first name of the
owner of the place. The woman who hired me was a bitch, when
she cooked her food she was still a bitch, and when I quit with
two hours notice she made me realize what it felt like to be
a bitch. The bitch even made me go by "Marcella" because
apparently my name was too god damned boring--but I still served
the food.
I did not work for one week in the winter as Mia
Farrow’s driver. I should have. I was offered the job
and I turned it down because I’m sure I had found something
better to do with my time. Thinking back on that, it was a mistake.
So Mia, if you’re out there, I’m readily available.
I played the White Rabbit in a national tour of
the famed "Alice in Wonderland" (musical version).
I wore a furry white bunny head, yellow jacket, blue knickers,
and a bow tie. I was Pat the bunny, touring the country’s
colleges and shopping malls, delighting and at the same time
horrifying the poor children who became entranced by my pseudo-asexual
rabbit-like mysticism. “Is she a he or is she a she
Mommy?" they wondered.
I even once posed as an HIV-positive college dropout
in a government-funded HIV/AIDS prevention campaign that sought
to experiment with the emotional livelihood of teens living
in the rural hills of a nameless southern state. America's tax
dollars hard at work.
So now I work in a bank where I pretend like I
don't see my boss embezzling money, pretend to be shocked each
time we get robbed (first Friday of every month), and where
I pretend to be enjoying the fact that the rest of the working
world's money is passing through my lower-class hands. I stand
here behind this plastic partition and stare out at that goddamned
plaque with the stupid Polaroid picture day in and day out --
everyday -- and I guess all I'm wondering is...
When do I get to be Employee of the Month?
....
Jenn does a lot. Read
her blog at http://carnegievandertramp.blogspot.com
for more details.
Read Jenn's: THINGS
NOT TO SAY TO THE U.S. CUSTOMS AGENCY
