papergirl mary fons blog Archives

3 Dec 2015

How I Imagine the Interview for Employment Goes at This One Coffee Shop on Michigan Avenue

by Mary | posted in: Plays, Rant | 2

How I Imagine an Interview for Employment Goes at This One Chain Coffee Shop on Michigan Avenue
by Mary Fons

(The HIRING MANAGER and APPLICANT sit at a table in a busy coffee shop.)

HIRING MANAGER: Hi! Thanks for coming by. We were really impressed with your application and I’m glad you could make it today.

APPLICANT stares at HIRING MANAGER.

HIRING MANAGER: Awesome. So I want to start out just telling you a bit about the company and what we’re looking for. We’re a full-service coffee and tea shop. We have many locations across Chicago and are really leaning in, as they say, haahahahahaa, to disrupt the market, you know, as they say, which is cool. So we want team members, you know, to really be a part of the family. I want to see if you’re a good fit, so I’m going to just ask you a few questions. Sound good?

APPLICANT: Whatever.

HIRING MANAGER: Okay: hypothetical question. A customer comes in. Chipper thirtysomething. Smiling. She exclaims, in a cheery way, to you guys at the counter: “It smells great in here! Wow! What is that? Muffins?” How do you respond?

APPLICANT: Just…nothing. No response.

HIRING MANAGER. Well, you’re off to a good start. Okay, next question. When there’s a line — and there is always a line at this location, always — and a customer finally gets to the register after like, 20 minutes of waiting, ignored, what do you do?

APPLICANT: Just stare at them.

HIRING MANAGER: Good. And…?

APPLICANT: When they start to talk, I guess I’d turn to someone else behind the counter and ask them something and then go to the warmer and put something in and take something out. And then return to the register and then just wait.

HIRING MANAGER: I am…impressed. That’s exactly right. Okay. Hot tea. Serve it hot or stone cold?

(APPLICANT takes out phone, plays Candy Crush. HIRING MANAGER also takes out phone. Text messages boyfriend.)

HIRING MANAGER: Anyway, the tea, whenever… Did you already answer? About the tea temperature?

APPLICANT: (Putting phone away.) I don’t care.

HIRING MANAGER: (Laughs at her own text. Puts phone on counter and glances at it through the rest of the interview. She looks up at APPLICANT.) You got the trick question? Seriously? “I don’t care” is exactly right. Oh, and here’s a tip, but don’t tell them I told you: When a customer asks, super nice, if you can heat up her beverage, be extremely, extremely sour about it. And make sure it takes forever.

APPLICANT: Cool.

HIRING MANAGER: All right, we’re almost done. I see on your application you have no prior job experience whatsoever. Nothing. That’s perfect. Oh, also… Yeah, there’s something called a cash register. Do you think you could use one?

APPLICANT: Is it hard?

HIRING MANAGER: Nope. A baby could do it.

(APPLICANT is silent, stares off into space.)

HIRING MANAGER: I know it’s scary. But we’d train you. Well, another employee who has been on the register for one day would train you. Melissa. She’s the girl who gave you the application that came out of the printer that needs ink.

APPLICANT: I guess I could learn it.

HIRING MANAGER: You, my dear, are hired. Welcome to the family! Everyone here is family. You’re already invited to the Holiday Party! It’s here in the shop during business hours, so we’re closed on a Thursday afternoon at high traffic time. I don’t think people will mind.

THE END

*EDITOR’S NOTE: I don’t know what to write about California. I’m still mourning Paris. I can’t handle the anger and powerlessness I feel about citizens of my city being murdered by their fellow citizens every day. I can’t process, much less speak about any of this so I wrote this silly play. But I wanted to say that I’m as anxious and depressed as all of you and maybe this (possibly true) play will distract us for two seconds. I just want to know how a person chooses to cut a brother or sister’s life short. I can’t understand it and I try not to write about things I can’t understand. I fail all the time. But I can’t even approach this one.

23 Nov 2015

Opening The Door, Part II: Me Of Little Faith.

by Mary | posted in: Chicago, Day In The Life | 1

My tenants didn't look like these chuckleheads, but they were apparently as squeaky-clean. Three's Company publicity photo courtesy Wikipedia. — My tenants didn’t look like these chuckleheads, but they were apparently as squeaky-clean. Three’s Company publicity photo courtesy Wikipedia.

I’m ashamed of myself.

There were nights when I actually lost sleep obsessing about people living in my house while I was not in it.. These people were good people. Students. Film professionals. A professor. But still. Dishes break. Folks have (hopefully good) parties. Bad emails come in and you punch a wall. Would my cream-colored carpet be wrecked? Would my couch be all jacked up? Would the baseboards be really, really gross? I didn’t think anyone would damage anything on purpose or be wantonly reckless; I just had a lot of anxiety about it.

Well, guess what I found when I opened the door? Stewardship! Care! Consideration! I’m ashamed of myself that I had so little faith in people. I’m a jerk. Really, I am a jerk.

Every person who had a key to this place treated it with respect. Or, if one of them didn’t, the rest of the gang made it right. There were no bloodstains. There weren’t even wine stains. My planed wood dining table has nary a scratch. Are you kidding me?? I will absolutely scratch this table at some point in the next year — but none of my tenants did.

Okay: the mirrored dresser in my bedroom is cracked across the top. But that’s what a table runner is for! Anyone could’ve cracked that thing, including me. I did have a professional carpet and mattress cleaning company come in before I got home, which I think was smart. And yeah, the baseboards are really gross. And I was faced with confusing feelings in the kitchen: the entire top shelf of my open cupboards went totally untouched. No one used the vases, the china, or the unusual dishes up there (e.g., ramekins, fancy mise en place bowls, etc.). On one hand, it was like I never left. On the other hand, everything has a stubborn film of dusty grease because that shelf is high up over the stove. Ew.

I’m still deep-cleaning the whole place because I like deep-cleaning and mentally, I must do this. But tenants, if you’re reading this, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my wicked, faithless heart for being the civilized, thoughtful people that you always were but who I lamed-out on in my head. You’re welcome back anytime. I’ll open a bottle of wine and you can watch me trip on my shoelace and spill an entire glass on the floor.

5 Jun 2015

Word Campaign: “Thisclose”

by Mary | posted in: Day In The Life, Word Nerd | 2

That'll do it. Bullfight, Plaza de Toros, Madrid, Spain, 2007. Photo: Wikipedia — Oof. Bullfight, Plaza de Toros, Madrid, Spain, 2007. Photo: Wikipedia

Language is a living, breathing thing. It morphs, it adapts, it sheds its skin. Being that this is true, I would like to propose that “thisclose” to enter the English lexicon. One sees this word being used in certain cases and I feel thisclose is legitimate, needed, and rather elegant. Allow me to make the case.

I am beside myself that in the past few years the word “literally” has lost its original meaning. “Literally” used to mean “actually,” so if you said, “The hotel room was so gross, I was literally barfing,” it meant that you were actually barfing because you found your hotel room unacceptable. You were saying that vomit was coming out of your head because the definition of “literally” meant “taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory.” But some point, “literally” came to mean something like, “I was totally barfing over that hotel room,” or “I felt like barfing.” The way I see it, this is a bad morph. Whenever someone says, “I was literally over the moon,” I just stare at them and envision him or her actually flying over the actual moon.

But I have to get over it. Because that’s what language does. This is the nature of the thing. Language adds to itself, e.g, “That dude’s jacket is on fleek” and it subtracts, e.g., “That dude’s jacket is aces.”

Now that I’ve buried the lede, let’s go back to thisclose.

When there’s a close call, or when someone is on the verge of doing something but chooses not to do it, “thisclose” is precisely what they mean. Examples:

“I was thisclose to throwing my computer out the window.”
“I was thisclose to asking her out but I just didn’t have the nerve.”
“The bull was thisclose to skewering that dude and it was a shame because his jacket was on fleek, dawg.”

Right? (The pronunciation would be “THIS-close,” by the way.) Golly, I think it’s tops. You see it out there, but it needs to be official. It might be the word-of-the-year at some point (the Times chooses one of these each year, along with the American Dialect Society and the Oxford Dictionary and when they do that, it goes into the dictionary.) Maybe I’ll start a campaign, except I’d be crushed if this great word would lose out to “fleek.” As in:

“My favorite new word was thisclose to being selected but it lost out. I feel like throwing my computer out the window.”

19 Apr 2015

Community Service: It’s About Time

by Mary | posted in: D.C., Family, Rant | 2

A couple months ago, I was profoundly annoyed with myself. Oh, I’ve been annoyed with myself plenty since then, but this was a big one.

For a long time, I’ve had this stock comment that I share in the course of small talk about extreme weather. Say it’s blisteringly hot or dangerously cold and I’m in a taxicab and the driver and I are lamenting about how very, very bad it is outside. I frequently would share that I worried about the elderly in extreme weather like this.

I was 100% sincere. When it’s in the upper nineties or higher, when it’s negative anything, I am genuinely concerned about the eldest among us because they are vulnerable in temperatures like those. They’re often shut into their homes for long stretches because of weather that bad. Cupboards and fridges go bare; medication runs out. And if the heating or cooling system breaks, old folks can die in their homes from the weather. In America.

But what exactly, Ms. Fons, is the use of making your concern and your feelings known to a cabdriver? This, I realized with a cosmic smack, is worse than pointless. I decided that if I made that comment one more time in my life without doing something about it, I couldn’t live with myself. And I meant it.

I’ve signed up to volunteer with an organization in DC called “We Are Family.” They visit seniors, take groceries to them, check in on them in inclement weather; stuff like that. My first volunteer experience with them will be next Saturday for a grocery delivery; the Saturday after that, I’ll go on some visits. I am profoundly glad I’m going to be home for awhile so I can do this. I’ve been excited to get started but of course haven’t been home.

Old people used to terrify me. While in the process of ruining his life, my father worked at a particularly depressing, shabby nursing home in Winterset and made us visit his “friends” at that terrible place. Going to a nursing home is traumatic for any person I’ve ever met who went to one as a kid. They’re startling, confusing places for children. When Alzheimers patients scream babble to no one — or to the child directly — they’re pure nightmare.

But I’m over it. We’re all temporarily young. And I’ma say it: our culture seems to be awfully good at putting our elderly out to pasture. I’m finding it increasingly untenable that this is the case. How have I only now realized that there is a universe of solid advice and great stories via people who have so been there? I just have to ask. And can you imagine being old and lonesome, just watching TV all day while that advice and those stories get dustier and dustier, utterly unused? Nightmare, indeed.

Yo, Fons! Less blithe, passing commentary; more fix.