So who else do I tell you about, at the Job from Hell?
Have I mentioned the guy, not a boss but an employee who somehow owned a muscle sports car — not a bad trick, considering that the last I heard of him he was running a hot dog stand outside a Home Depot — and who adored using it for one activity in particular, that they extolled at length every time you gave him any opportunity at all?
No, not THAT activity.
What he loved, what he advocated, what he described in rich sensory detail, was waiting until a really heavy rain, the kind that caused curbsides to flood, and hopping into his car to a certain outdoor mall he knew about, forty minutes from our office, where the street became soup adjacent to a bus shelter, waiting until the bus shelter was stuffed with poor people huddled together (in what was often cold) as they waited for the bus that would take them from one part of their shitty lives to another, and at the moment of maximum population shift his missile into first gear and roar past the bus stop at full speed, drenching them with the wake?
Water was great, he said, but in the wintertime, slush was even better.
He loved that. Simply adored that. Told the story of doing that with a big broad smile on his face.
He especially loved doing that to old black women. He specified this. He thought that was inherently hilarious. I saw no particular OTHER racism in his daily behavior, including his interactions with black employees to whom he was perfectly cordial, but this was enough.
At the time I knew him we worked morning shifts and evening shifts, with afternoons free, and whenever it was torrential downpour in the mornings he was practically hopping up and down in his seat with excitement, over the fun to come. He used to beg me to come along. “Adam! C’mon! I’ll drive you! You’ve got to see this, just once!” It genuinely bothered him that I wasn’t keeping an open mind, that I never went, though a couple of other co-workers succumbed to his blandishments and went along, at one time or another, returning with the report, “No, he wasn’t fucking with us. This is his actual leisure-time activity.”
Forty minutes there. Lying in wait for the bus stop to be sufficiently crowded. Then forty minutes back. This would be his afternoon, and he wanted a companion for this adventure, like the worst episode of DOCTOR WHO ever.
In the list of appalling personalities at the Job From Hell, he would barely crack the top ten, coming in just behind the guy who loved driving down to Hooker Row and offering them insultingly low prices for ridiculously demeaning services.
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