Making a Big Deal Out Of It

There's a man that comes into where I work and I can't stand him.

Where I work now is great. I enjoy it a lot. It's a coffee shop and, while I don't like coffee, I enjoy the idea of it and learning more about it, etc. But that doesn't matter. Whether it's a great job or a bad one, there will always be horrible customers. Maybe this should go in another blog called Horrible Customers. ...nah.

Let's start from the beginning. When I first helped this man, I remember him saying something to me about how death and karma are optional. I believe his exact words were "Death and karma are optional." He bought a burrito (we serve 'lite fare' as well) but accused our oven of not being one (he thought it was a microwave) and told us to toast it. Which takes forever and, when you think about how burritos are usually cooked, toasting or baking it wouldn't work anyway. So if you don't happen to have a range and frying pan on hand, microwaving, as horrible as it sounds, is probably the best thing for your dumb tortilla stuffed with old food. But hey, that's not so bad. Someone saying weird stuff and griping about how they'd like their burrito cooked...no big deal. Happens all the time.

Well, this man soon becomes a regular. But not a regular customer. Oh, no. He's a regular freeloader, a real mooch, a rotten loiterer. We have free wireless fidelity (wi-fi) at the shop for those who have laptops and such, but we also supply a computer as well. Just one. And this man, I'm pretty sure he thinks it's his. He begins coming in nightly, staying until we close (which is late) and doing something on that computer the whole time. He's plugging in shit and whipping out his little laptop (turns out he's got one anyway) and he has all these bags. He's not a homeless guy if that's what you're thinking. A lot of stuff, in fact, looks quite expensive. He wears these expensive-looking outdoor jackets and clothes and has fancy name-brand luggage. Anyway, he's a regular guy basically. And while he's doing all this, he's not paying. He doesn't buy anything. He comes in at five and leaves at ten when we close without purchasing a thing.

I let this go for one night and of course us co-workers talk about this man and how he's a bother but we don't really ever say anything. The next nite this happens, he's been in for a good couple hours and hasn't bought anything yet so I go up to him and just tell him he needs to buy something.

Here's the thing. We kind of have lots of people that come in and never buy anything. But usually, they're with other people and they're just talking in the corner or something and it's not really a big deal or anything. We tell ourselves that if they were taking space from paying customers then yeah, we'd tell them to buy something, but we usually have enough room. So we just leave it. But this guy isn't like that, plus he's awkward and uncomfortable and just dumb. Let me tell you what I mean.

So tell I him he needs to buy something and he says he's fine with his water bottle. Idiot. I say, "No, you have to buy something." (I say more than this but you know what I mean) So nonchalantly, he says he might get some tea in while. Moron. Eventually he does. But so what? I still hate him. He's still all weird and everything.

Well, the next nite he comes in and does the same thing. I decide not to say anything because I know he knows. He knows he should buy something. I just told him last the nite before. But he never does. Minutes after we close and he's packing up his shit I tell him that we reserve our computer for paying customers. He looks at me and, well that's it. He just looks at me. I can't stand him. I don't care if I have a problem. This man flat out bothers me.

He doesn't show up for a while. But we soon figure out why. The coffee shop I work at is attached to a hotel. There's an entrance straight to the shop and also through the hotel. If you go into the hotel from the shop, a couple doors down there is a the breakfast room which has tables and a couple televisions and it's always open...for guests of the hotel. Clearly. It's in the hotel. Well, one nite, after we've closed, my co-worker and I pass by the breakfast room and see him in there hanging out. We tell the front desk that there's an idiot upstairs.

I soon find out that the owner of the hotel confronted the man (in the breakfast room with all the lights off) and told him everything and the man stammered on about...whatever. Anyway, that got taken care of. He now buys stuff.

Well time goes on and we don't seem for a little while. And then recently he shows up again. He still sets up camp around the computer for all hours of the evening, but he buys stuff. So that's great, right?

No, he's still a retard. He complains about everything. About how the bathroom smells, about the music being all wrong, about the food or our coffee or whatever. Shut up, already. One nite he complained about the music sounding too depressing so I changed it, like a saint. The very next nite he said it was too "drummy." Could we change it to something a little more mellow? he asked. I looked at him, and I had had it with this ____. I said no. He seemed confused and asked again, explaining why. I said no, I like this station. "Oh. Did you change it earlier? Or...?" Oh brother. "Yes. I changed it."And then I just tell him, "Nothing's ever really perfect for you is it?" I say this somewhat jokingly. Hell, nothing's ever perfect for me either. But I don't care. "How do you mean?" he asks. So I tell him. I tell him he's always whining about stuff and I give examples and I say that if I change it now, he'll just whine again later. By now, I don't care I'm telling him this stuff. He says something like that's not how he sees it; he's just asking a simple request. And then walks off. Then we get a complaint from him about the music. But no one cares. We all know who he is. Front desk knows he is. The owner knows he is. All of the coffee shop employees know who he is.

And no one cares. No one gives a shit about this moronic human being and I love it.

The one in which Rachel attempts to go viral

I’ve never been particularly web savvy. I didn’t get a Facebook account until college. I never did MySpace. And my Twitter account leaves few web crumbs in its path.

Nevertheless, like the millions of other fresh-faced unknowns spawned in the times of Paris and “Keeping up with the Kardashians,” I too have wondered what it would be like to become a viral sensation. To make YouTube’s “Most Popular.” To generate hundreds of response copy-cat videos. To be AutoTuned in slow motion. Blogged about. To become a trending topic on Twitter. Or better yet, a meme. To eventually amass enough of an online following to open an e-store selling branded merchandise. I’m partial to the idea of a “Rachel” bobble-head myself.

To saturate the web to such colossal proportions that highbrow publications, like “The New York Times,” have no choice but to reference you. Albeit two weeks too late.

And in the process, squeeze every possible dollar out of the “personal shame/embarrassment for public laughs” transaction until you fade into internet obscurity 48 hours later. Or are ushered into the Internet’s “Hall of Fame” among such greats as the “Dance Evolution” guy or the sobbing “Leave Britney alone” guy. Only with better makeup (and no sex tape :O).

I can’t lie. Internet stardom does carry a certain allure. It would be nice to Google my name and be the first result to come up. Or to stumble across a Wikipedia article of my life.

Instead, search for the name “Rachel Brown” and a woman running for Congress comes up. Or that woman on the “Hell’s Kitchen” TV show who committed suicide. So much for giving “Rachel Brown” a good spin.

So much for my Internet debut. But don’t think I’m shedding tears (or strategizing) over my online anonymity. At the ripe old age of 22, I’ve made peace with my obscurity. I can live without birthing an offspring of fake Rachel Brown Facebook pages all pretending to be me. I can survive without, gasp, a “Rachel Brown” bobble-head. To be entirely fair, it would have to feature a more cone-shaped head anyway.

And, if the The Register, is right, I don’t have skills for YouTube stardom anyway. I can’t “drink lots” or “corrupt innocent children’s' characters.” I’ve never won a video-game in my life and my clumsy lip synching is best left to the privacy of my home.

But I may still have the last laugh.

For the past several days, I’ve been plagued by a stuffy nose and hacking cough. Just a day ago, my work colleague started to develop symptoms of a cold. Symptoms that eerily resembled mine.

In the end, this Rachel Brown has indeed become a viral hit – of the germ kind.

And that’s got to count for something, right?

The one in which Rachel rambles on about elevators

I spend a lot of time in elevators. Enough time to realize I’m lucky. Enough time to Photoshop the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie poster to embody the descent into horrors that happens on a cursory elevator ride in my building (all images represent actual views of floors in my building from within the elevator).

You get in on the 9th, press the greasy cold button, and then, BAM! Someone on the 7th needs to get on and as the elevator doors swoosh open to reveal lumpy carpeting and wrinkled walls, you gasp in horror and think to yourself:

“I am lucky to not work on this floor. Very lucky indeed.”

You may actually say this out loud as well.

I have an interesting relationship with elevators. For one thing, it stretches pretty far back – all the way back to age 11 when my family moved from a first floor to a seventh.

You begin to appreciate elevators when you live on a seventh. You also begin to hate them.

Our 20+ year old building was like a dignified Englishman who daily smokes a pipe: stately on the outside, rotten on the inside. Unfortunately, in our case, the rotting extended to the elevator shafts. This led to multiple breakdowns and stalls (with and without people stuck inside). This also led to much huffing and puffing up seven flights of stairs. Even on grocery day.

Maybe my Mom had a hunch early on that she would live in a building with a moody elevator. Exploiting your four children as pack llamas certainly cuts down on the number of grocery runs up seven flights of stairs.

Besides the occasional breakdown, there was also the issue of moving. How do you fit a couch into an elevator? Or a bed? You don’t. That’s when you hope you have a lot of friends with the brute strength to lug a couch up seven flights. Because four whiny kids just don’t cut it.

Going for a bicycle ride in the potted courtyard below also presented a unique challenge. You learn at a tender age to hoist your bike onto its back wheel and imprison yourself behind it within the elevator (going against every instinct of survival in your body). Which makes for an awkward – albeit strangely intimate – ride down should any other apartment dweller climb into your elevator by chance.

This is when the art of “elevator talk” comes in handy. This ever-polite, pause-infused, head-nodding mode of speech becomes your sole defense mechanism as you feebly wave hello from behind the bike wheel. It’s that or pretend to deeply contemplate the grease on your chain. Like that fools anybody.

At least you can rely on an elevator for discretion.

On one particularly hot summer day in ’99, I decided to take “Oso,” the yellow lab we were dog-sitting, on a jaunt around the potted courtyard. I had the spent my morning lounging on the sofa with a book, oblivious to the heat waves flickering over the sidewalk outside. Oblivious to my body’s need for water.

After shuffling after Oso as he made his “rounds,” I sluggishly pulled him into the elevator to go back up. I remember leaning against the cool metallic panel of the elevator. And then I don’t remember anything else. Somewhere between floors 4 and 5 I fainted. When I woke up, I was on the floor. The elevator doors were opening. And Oso looked mournfully on.

At least, with a dog there is no need for “elevator talk.”

The one in which Rachel's eyes let her down

My eyes carry a heavy burden. And I’m not referring to the weight of the glass suspended between my pair of outdated frames.

No. In my family, poor vision is regarded as a competitive sport. And we can be ruthless.

Prescriptions are meticulously discussed (blue eyes winning out over brown due to their enhanced sensitivity to light). Epic narratives of contact lenses lost to sinks, tubs and…toilets, reach legendary proportions. Unspoken rites that involve reusing the same pair of contacts/glasses for supernatural stretches of time become de rigeuer. And no one blinks an eye.

We are a clan of lumbering, half-blind Browns. But we are proud of it. And we have my Dad to thank.

I remember the time my Dad ran the “Sound to Narrows Run” in Tacoma, Washington. This 12k run winds the runner up and down Tacoma’s hilly streets and plunges him into Point Defiance’s Jurassic Park-like foliage. This run causes your calves to scream.

The roller-coaster terrain didn’t do my Dad in. Oh no. It was the eyes. Somewhere around the 4k mark, one of his contact lenses popped out onto the gravel course. Just like that. But the man remained unfazed.

Ever aware of the clock, he paused to scoop up the missing contact and then proceeded to spit into the palm of his hand to wipe off any gravel specs. He then plunked it back into place. In his eye. It was a “Jesus giving sight to the blind by rubbing spit and mud in the eye” moment. Only do-it-yourself style.

That’s my childhood legacy. Stories like those. Retellings of my Dad duct taping his frames back together (thus, was the utilitarian Brown spirit). And you thought this was something that only existed within the teen comedy genre. For the Brown children, it was reality.

And continues to be. When one of my contact lenses flared up on a trip to Amsterdam this past summer, I did what any good Brown child knows to do. I removed the offending contact and placed it in a trusty spot: in this case, my Dad’s water bottle. My rationale? The water would keep the contact sufficiently hydrated within an enclosed container. I then gave the water bottle back to my Dad with clear instructions to “not drink from it.”

I was tempting fate. Back at the hostel that evening, I soon realized that my Dad had, indeed, “drunk from it." Half of the water was gone.

As I stared in disbelief, my ever practical mother suggested we inspect the bottle for the rare possibility that the contact had managed to survive my Dad’s gulps. Survived it had. And in hydrated form too. Less than a minute later it was back in my eye – now positively refreshed.

What can I say? I’m shameless.

It wasn’t until this past week that I realized how far of a goner I was. When my right eye sprouted a scramble of inflamed red veins, I did nothing. I simply removed the offending contact lens to soak it and went about my day – with only one good eye. I did this for 3 days: only occasionally bumping into protruding edges and corners.

My roommate advised me to throw it out. "What? And waste a perfectly good contact"? Had all my father's lessons been in vain?

Not quite. I did remove the musty contact and replace it with a new one. But I couldn't bring myself to throw it out. Not yet. So there it sits among a jumble of shower products. Awaiting the day I muster the courage to pop it back in – should I be in a pinch.

That, or the day my Dad somehow manages to accidentally swallow it.