Morty

Posted on March 15th, 2012 by Adam-Troy Castro

A Remake Chronicles Extra by Adam-Troy Castro

At one point during my eye-rolling seventeen years at the Job From Hell, I was appointed the manager  of the Customer Service Department, an assignment that I was to learn reflected the company’s belief that the sales jobs were for people who could produce and customer service was where you put any asshole who couldn’t.

This makes me one of the assholes. I freely admit it. I was burned out on sales and extraordinarily bad at dealing with abusive morons. But as manager, my job was often dealing with psychopaths or losers even in the office, among them the guy whose idea of a fun afternoon was to take his car out after a big rain and drive fast over puddles, to splatter the old ladies waiting at bus stops; and the guy who I had to stop from singing jolly songs about, excuse me, old broken down  niggers in the office. There was also a guy so clearly crazy that, while he was working there, was mistaken by a TV news crew as homeless and filmed for a news report on mentally ill people roaming the streets.

Then there’s Morty.

Morty was a greasy little man of about fifty, and if you think I abuse him by calling him greasy, I assure you that I am being 100% accurate, as you could tell what papers he had been handling from all the see-through fingerprints.

He could not ad-lib a fart after a heavy meal.

This is a drawback in customer service. Yes, we had a script for handling problems, but people will say things that are off-script; you need to be able to deal with them as a human being. Morty kept putting his hand over the mouthpiece and asking me questions like, “This woman just said that she has to rush out the door and pick up her daughter — what do I say?” I had to give him an answer, each time. He did this even when the customer’s problem was identical to one our guidebook accounted for, only phrased differently. We were set up for customers who wanted us to take their payments on pay day, for instance…but Morty would ask me what to say if the customer said “Friday” instead. He was that helpless. And each time I gave him guidance he had to scrawl my instruction on a yellow post-it note and pop it up onto the wall, so many of them that soon he had the whole wall feathered with them, in a system opaque to me.
  
Morty was so worthless that when, at one point, he had to call a customer whose check had bounced, and was told by a sobbing woman that her husband had just died in a flaming car wreck and that she was out the door and on her way to the hospital, he said, “So will you be able to replace that payment when you get back?”

I hollered, “MORTY! FOR GOD’S SAKE! BE A HUMAN BEING! TELL THE WOMAN YOU’RE SORRY FOR HER LOSS!”

He took out a yellow post-it-note and wrote on it that when a customer referenced a sudden death in their family, he should say that he was sorry for the loss.

Which wasn’t so bad until the next time something like that happened, a few weeks later, and the son of a bitch actually said to the customer, “Excuse me, ma’am, I’ve written down what I have to say in a case like that,” then stood up and rifled through his forest of yellow post-its and, reading robotically, said, “I…am…sorry…for…your…loss…”

This ACTUALLY happened. I know you cannot countenance any human being that stupid. But it actually happened.

But even this was not Morty’s most horrific point of incompetency.

That was this: he could not say ”Visa, Mastercard, or Discover Card” to save his life.

Every time he offered payment options he said, “Vista, Mastercharge, or the Discovery Card.”

This, people, burned in my breast.

I’d say, “Morty. It’s the Visa, Mastercard, and Discover Card.”
 
He said, “Vista. Mastercharge. Discovery Card.”
  
“Morty. Say Visa.”
 
“Visa.”

“Say Mastercard.”

“Mastercard.”

“Say Discover Card.”

“Discover Card.”

“Now say the whole thing.”

“Vista. Mastercharge. Discovery Card.”

Go Back to line one.

This became an issue.

He’d be on the phone with a customer, while I monitored him.

“You can pay by Vista –”
  
“MORTY! VISA!”

“Sorry, Visa…or Mastercharge…”

“MORTY! MASTERCARD!”

“Sorry, Mastercard…or the Discovery Card…”

“MORTY! THE DISCOVER CARD!”

“Sorry. Discover Card. You can pay by Vista, Mastercharge, or the Discovery Card.”

Later:

“Morty. Here’s the card from my wallet. What does it say?”

“Vista.”

“Look again, Morty.”

(Defensively) “It’s a Vista.”

“MORTY. WHAT DOES THAT LOGO SAY?”

“Visa.”

“Okay. So what kind of card is it?”

“A Vista.”

We are talking dozens of corrections a work shift, going on for a period of several months.

“Morty. Visa.”
  
“Vista.”

“No. Not Vista. Visa.”

“Visa.”

“Fine. Say it again.”

“Visa.”

“And this is a Mastercard.”

“Mastercard.”

“And this is a Discover.”
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“Discover.”

“Now say them all.”

“Vista. Mastercharge. Discovery Card.”

He couldn’t do it. He honestly couldn’t do it.

Came the point where 90% of my energy was dedicated to making sure Morty could have a conversation with a customer without screwing up on this or any other major point, and I decided to go for broke and attempt a thought experiment. I went out to an art supply shop and bought a giant piece of posterboard, upon which I painted, in letters six inches high, VISA. MASTERCARD. DISCOVER. Before he came to work I cleared the wall above his desk of every single yellow post-it-note and put this poster up, in a place where he would be staring at it from two feet away during any phone call he made.

He came in, sat down, and did not notice that all his yellow post-its were gone.

He spoke to a customer. “Vista…Mastercharge…and the Discovery Card.”

He spoke with another customer. “Vista…Mastercharge…and the Discovery Card.”

He spoke with a third customer. “Vista…Mastercharge…and the Discovery Card.”

Five more times in rapid succession.

I told him, “Morty. Look up.”

He stared at the wall. “What?”

“Morty, read the words actually in front of you.”

“Vista. Mastercharge. Discovery Card.”

“No. Read THAT POSTER.”

Slow blinking. “Oh, yeah.”

“What does it say?”

“Visa. Mastercard. The Discover Card.”

“Do you think you can say it right, with a customer, just once?”

“Okay.”

Next call, staring fixedly at the poster, he got it wrong AGAIN. He could not get it right even with a billboard instructing him on the right way to say it.

Morty was not fired for cause, but not long afterward for budget cuts; when we started hiring again, he called me up to get his old job back, telling me that he knew he had excelled at it. I was gentle. I didn’t actually hate the guy. He was not a bad guy. He was supporting a young son and would clearly never, ever excel at anything enough to make a good living. I just didn’t want him working for me.

He was an average human being.

And the saddest part of that statement is that it means, half the people out there are *beneath* him in basic competency….

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Lucky Mckee’s THE WOMAN: A Quick Review

Posted on February 24th, 2012 by Adam-Troy Castro

A Remake Chronicles Extra by Adam-Troy Castro

Last night’s ferociously visceral horror movie from Netflix: THE WOMAN, directed by Lucky Mckee, from the novel by McKee and Jack Ketchum. It became notorious when a viewer at a film festival stood up in rage and started excoriating the rest of the audience for watching what she termed violent pornography against women — at which point much of the rest of the audience, including a number of women… who liked the film, told her to either walk out and leave the rest of them in peace, or shut the fuck up.

Well, I’ve seen the film now, and must report that it is by no means the most violent horror film I’ve ever seen; it is, in fact, likely less violent than many episodes of THE WALKING DEAD. But it is, as one would expect from Ketchum, deeply confrontational. The premise has to do with what initially looks like an ordinary family, whose Dad discovers a snarling, filthy, dangerously feral woman on a hunting trip. He drags her home, chains her in the cellar, and tells the family that they’re going to “civilize” her. It soon becomes clear that this is NOT an ordinary family; their normalcy is a mask for neighbors, and there are reasons for the wife’s submissiveness, the older daughter’s unnoticed misery, and the older son’s streak of vindictive cruelty.

The movie is more than a series of over-the-top shocks; there’s no shortage of those, but it uses a character-based approach, inviting us to infer the actual backstory from the timid way the wife acts around the husband, and the way the two older children interact with others at school. The horror arises from the next terrible thing happening, but happening naturally — and making retroactive sense even when it enters WTF territory, in its final minutes. The result is merciless, but I would defend it as a work of art. And I reject the accusations from some that it’s just an exercise in empty misogyny. The shallow viewers who thought this movie “glorifies” violence against women buy into the fundamental misunderstanding of fiction, that I cited a number of days ago: that stories are necessarily in favor of everything their characters do, or endorse their behavior as a recipe for a living.

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An Awful Clunk: Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin in PRESSURE POINT

Posted on February 19th, 2012 by Adam-Troy Castro

A Remake Chronicles Extra by Adam-Troy Castro

Y’ever see an old movie that’s clearly well-made, clearly well-meaning, clearly a work of the human conscience…that suddenly strikes a note so discordant with your modern sensibility that you cannot help wince?

I see a lot of old movies, and am sometimes forced to overlook or forgive such moments as the product of their time. For instance, Ingrid Bergman calls Dooley Wilson a “boy” in CASABLANCA, and you can wince at that, but the character of Sam is largely well-treated (though subservient), and not central to the story. The brilliant comedies of Harold Lloyd and some of Buster Keaton are marred by painful cameos by stereotyped Black people and in some cases by stereotyped Jews, but such fleeting appearances are not central to the stories they tell and can be forgiven; your mileage may vary.

Then there’s a case like the movie I saw today, PRESSURE POINT.

It’s not a bad film, at all, though it’s not the shocking and searing drama it was intended to be at the time. One of producer Stanley Kramer’s many “message” pictures — a number of which weather the years untouched — it involves the conflict between a Black prison psychiatrist (Sidney Poitier) and a disturbed Nazi-sympathizing inmate (Bobby Darin) during World War II.

Poitier is as powerful as he always is. He was too versatile an actor to be relegated to the function he usually served, that of the Black platonic ideal; but it needs to be said that because this WAS his usual function, he was exquisite at communicating dignity, righteousness, and simmering moral strength. (It’s hard to name many actors, white or black, who so clearly communicate intelligence.) In this film, he’s a man who puts himself on a tight leash, because of his revulsion for the inmate he is duty-bound to help, and he’s riveting in it. So is Darin, who — I apologize to his fans, but it happens to be true — has a face that makes him very, very persuasive as a nonentity who will never amount to much.

The film takes the form of an extended flashback, told by a much older version of his character (with gray added to his temples), to a new prison psychiatrist (a very young Peter Falk) having his own professional crisis of faith. For some reason that escapes me, Poitier’s character decides that the best way to keep Falk’s character from quitting on his own revolting inmate patient is to tell him this story of an inmate he never quite reached — one who, we eventually learn, ended up being paroled because Poitier’s superiors believed his claims of rehabilitation over his black doctor’s, and who was ultimately executed after committing another murder on the outside. Gee, that’s motivation! If I was Peter Falk’s character, I’d run right back to my office!

The now squirm-worthy moment comes after the extended flashback, after the faith of Peter Falk’s character is somehow restored by this long and dispiriting anecdote of psychiatry’s ultimate failure, and after he rescinds his resignation and resolves to return to his problem inmate.

He says he even has a plan for how he’s going to handle the job.

What follows are the closing lines of the film.

“I’m going to get some burnt cork,” he says, “and cover my face with it.”

Poitier’s character nods. “Just don’t fail me because you’re white.”

Ow. Ow. Ow.

No. No. No. What an awful clunk THAT dialogue was!

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