Honest Conversation is Overrated – Part 1: Endgame

My boss calls the area where our register is “The Comm”, as though our store was The USS Enterprise, and not a basement comic book store with a computer that runs on Windows 98 and crossed fingers.

When he asks me to “take The Comm”, he means one of three things: 1.) He is about to leave for an indeterminate amount of time and wants to make sure I know he’s leaving; 2.) Someone he finds stressful is going approach the counter, and he doesn’t want to deal with them; or 3) Someone he finds interesting has entered the store and he would rather talk to them than ring up someone’s stack of Vampirella comics.

Most often, it’s options one or three, as my boss is not only almost criminally patient but also one of the more popular people working in our neighborhood. Probably because he’s almost criminally patient. Certainly, he’s criminally negligent patient.

I used to be patient, too. I used to be a nanny for a group of three boys so enraging that I once saw a Buddhist Monk come about a quarter of an inch from stabbing one of the kids in the eye with a stick of vanilla bean incense. But sixteen years of waiting tables and twenty years of working retail have taught me how to smile and talk with the presence of a fascinated journalist while imagining how happy a customer’s family will be at the customer’s funeral. “Sure,” they’ll say, “Uncle Bill had his good points. He left me his ninety foot Colombian sloop in his will, and two out of his seven children probably won’t go back to prison again in their lifetime. Still, I can’t help but think how much better our lives will be now that he was found with his vas deferens scarfed around his neck and his prostrate stuffed into his left nostril. The only real question is, what do we do with all his Nazi Fetish Pornography?”