From time to time, an interval that included yesterday, I share stories of my gainful employment at what I now call the Job From Hell.
Most of the stories are appalling or horrific.
But it is impossible even for a place that abusive to be one-hundred percent awful all the time, and so I here bring your attention to one of the co-workers I actually liked.
Her name was Barbara, and she was, essentially, Edith Bunker.
As I’ve told this story before, I have had people object at this point in the narrative, crying that this is a terrible thing to say about somebody.
No. It’s terrible to say that someone’s Archie Bunker. Though even he was a man of hidden depths.
It’s kind of wonderful to say of someone that she’s Edith Bunker. Edith may have been the kind of woman who thought, in Norman Lear’s formulation, that Plato was Mickey Mouse’s dog, but she was also gentle, kind, compassionate, and principled. We need more Edith Bunkers in the world.
Barbara was a kindly, gentle, religious woman who was honestly a pleasure to see every day, even if – and indeed, especially because – she had Edith’s other attributes as well, including among them a way of saying things in perfect seriousness that were enough to make others break up as soon as they were safely out of earshot.
(She was among other endearing things a church lady deeply, deeply in love with Alan Rickman.)
Barbara’s job was to verify sales. Whenever somebody agreed to buy our product, she called five minutes later, confirmed all their information, and told them that their package would be out right away. It was also her job to cancel sales whenever a customer had had second thoughts, or – more often — denied ever having spoken to us, since there were at entire departments at the Job From Hell run by dishonest managers who jacked up their numbers by forcing salespeople to write up orders for people who had never even been contacted.
Once packages went out, there were any number of conversations between innocent people out there in the heartland, screaming that they’d never ordered our stupid box of shit, and our customer service department, required by duty to explain that yes, they had; and yes, sometimes the customers were lying, but because the managers were so happily fraudulent, just as often they were not.
Unpleasantness abounded. But Barbara was never a source of unpleasantness, even if she was sometimes a force for confusion.
Came the day when she was on her phone, separated from me by a divider and a hallway, and I immediately fell into a trance listening to the outrageous conversation she was stuck in. I listened to all of it, grinning like a loon, and marched into the Boss’s office saying, “I don’t care how busy you are or what you’re doing. But you have to know about the conversation Barbara just had.”
It had indeed been one of the great found conversations, the kind of thing professional fiction writers hear and recognize as classic and paste into the memory album, because we want all the words we put into the mouths of our characters to sound this bonkers and human and real.
Twenty-five years later, I remember that conversation verbatim, and am about to share it with you.
This is what you need to know first, to avoid any of the nuances being lost in transcript.
When I say that Barbara was Edith Bunker, I include her voice. She spoke just like Jean Stapleton did as that fictional sitcom character so popular that her obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The same pitch. The same cadence. The same slow-paced, deliberate earnestness whenever she was explaining something of great importance to her; the delivery that once led Edith’s loving but cantankerous husband Archie to mime blowing his brains out, while she droned on.
If you read the following out loud to a loved one, as I suspect many of you will, you need to say it as sweetly and as slowly as Edith Bunker would.
I will help you by breaking it up into small paragraphs as a guide to delivery.
I will also advise you that in introducing herself, she never said, “Barbara,” the way you or I or Ms. Streisand would. She said, “BAH buh WAH,” three discreet syllables.
Okay? Okay. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Hamburger Conversation, verbatim.
Hello?
Mr. Jones?
Hello, sir. This is Barbara.
How did you enjoy your hamburger and French fries?
What’s that?
You don’t know what I’m talking about?
Don’t you remember I called you an hour ago?
I called to verify your order and you said you couldn’t talk right then because you were having dinner.
I said, oh, what are you having?
And you said, a hamburger.
And French fries.
I said oh, that sounds good, and promised to call back in an hour.
Now I’ve called back, and because I remember that you were having a hamburger and French fries I thought I’d ask first how your hamburger and French fries were.
How were your hamburger and French fries?
What’s that?
You still don’t remember? But I called you only an hour ago, and —
Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.
I’m so sorry.
You’re not the same customer. You’re a different Mr. Jones.
I thought you were the same Mr. Jones.
You see, when I called the other Mr. Jones he was having dinner.
I said, oh, what are you having?
He said a hamburger.
And French fries.
I said, oh, that sounds good, and promised to call back in an hour.
But then I got my cards a little mixed up and your name came up. You’re also named Jones.
So I remembered the other Mr. Jones saying that he was having a hamburger.
And French fries.
I remembered saying that sounds good and promising to call back in an hour.
You probably didn’t have a hamburger and French fries for dinner.
You must have had something else entirely.
Whatever it was, I sure hope you liked it!
What’s that?
You don’t even know who I am?
I told you. My name is Barbara.
(Pause). I don’t believe this man. He just hung up on me.
I don’t believe him either, frankly; I could have listened to that all day.