Lunch Break Verizon Store Fight

I was in a Verizon store today, getting a new phone, when a young, clean-shaven, overweight man in a wheelchair comes into the store and drives right up to the counter. He waits there a moment while a sales associate finishes screwing something into a small black device.


Sales guy turns to man and asks,


"How you doing, sir?" 


"What?" the wheelchair dude says.


"I asked how are you. Can I help you?" 


"Yeah, I'm tryin' to buy a phone." The wheelchair man says. He has one of those neon orange MTA vests on the back of his chair. 


"Are you a Verizon customer?" asked the employee. He's a young man, with a shaved head and a cute, fat face. 


"Yeah."


"What's your phone number?" Verizon guy asks.


"Why you need my personal information?"


"I need your phone number and the last four digits of your social to get into your account," he says, patient but a little irritated. 


The man in the wheelchair tells an irrelevant anecdote about being asked for his phone number in the East Village by a Verizon employee. 


The Verizon guy is like, "Sir, if you call Verizon customer service they're going to ask you the same thing." 


"Nah, it's okay," wheelchair man says, and drives over to the shelf of sleek-looking phones and tablets on display. 


"Why the hell these up so high?" he says. "I can't reach them."


Silence from the Verizon employee. Meanwhile, the man who's helping me set up my new phone is shaking his head in frustration.


"This guy's in here every week," he tells me in a loud voice. There's Michael Jackson playing on the stereo and a phone ringing in the back room. 


Suddenly the man in the wheelchair motors over to the back room.


"What's back here?" he says. 


"Sir, you can't go back there. That's for employees only," says Verizon. Suddenly Norman, the guy who's helping me, turns around and says loudly and matter-of-factly:


"Don't talk to him. Just throw him out of the store! He's not a Verizon customer; he doesn't even have an account."


But the wheelchair man isn't listening, because he's talking to a third Verizon employee, who's is in the back room, out of sight. 


Then, wheelchair man actually throws something at the guy in the storage room, who shouts:


"What the hell is that, a butt plug?" (Swear to God). 


"Hey, cripple! Yeah, you! Get out of the store!" This is the guy who's putting my phone together. 


"You're in here three times last week bothering us. Let this gentleman do his job. Get out of here before I call the cops." His voice is commanding but not mean.  


The wheelchair man swivels around and faces him. 


"Yeah, I heard you call me a retard and a midget to your friend. Right in front of me." 


"You're damn right I did," says my guy. 


And then he walks towards the man in the wheelchair and reaches out his arm. To give him a handshake. He starts laughing. "How you doing Davey?" he says. 


"I'm good, I'm good!" Says Wheelchair, laughing. "How you doing, man?"


The 2nd Verizon employee is as incredulous as I am. 


"You know this guy?" he asks. 


"Yeah, he works here. We go to baseball games all the time. We go way back. I had you though, huh?"


He admits, yes, he had him. "Oh man I got punked!" he says, looking around. "Where are the cameras?" 

'That, In Aleppo Once' by Vladimir Nabokov Is A Strange, Confusing Story. Here Is What Happens:

SUMMARY

The narrator is writing a letter to his friend, and in the letter he explains how his marriage fell apart and his wife left him. Basically, they were on a train fleeing the Nazis, and he jumped off the train to grab a sandwich or something, and the train left without him. When he finally met back up with his wife days later, she confesses that she's been having an affair with a travelling salesman.

The narrator is really angry, they fight and fight and finally make up. Things get better between them. But when the narrator finally gets the two visas to the USA, where his wife has an uncle living in New York, and buys two tickets for the trans-Atlantic boat, he returns to an empty apartment, and sees that his wife's two dresses, hat, and jacket are gone.

The city of Aleppo, in northwestern Syria. (photo by jason_harman on Flickr)

He walks all over the neighborhood, talking to the few people he and his wife had known there, and finally an old woman tells him that his wife fell in love with a moneyed Frenchman and would not be returning to him, for he was a violent bastard who had apparently threatened to shoot her and had killed her dog (neither of which are likely true.)



The narrator decides it's futile to try to track her down again. He boards the ship to the USA alone, and one night on board he runs into a doctor he used to play chess with. The doctor asks after his wife, and the narrator explains that she ran off with a French guy. The doctor is shocked to hear this, because, he says, he saw her the day the boat departed. She was wandering aimlessly by the docks; he had spoken with her, and she'd told him that she was waiting for her husband to arrive with the bags before she could get on the boat.


At this point in the story, the narrator tells us that he realized his wife HAD NEVER EXISTED. He's like, totally convinced of this. And at this point I'm all like WTF are you talking about, dude?

The author, a young, expressionless Nabokov (photo Jean Vong/Nabokov estate/NYT)

He backs up his hypothesis that his wife was an illusion all along by saying that when he got to America he went to find his wife's "supposed uncle," and there is no building at the address his wife had given him. Apparently (someone tells him) the uncle and his wife had moved to San Francisco a while before, after their daughter died.


But to me that's no proof that his wife NEVER EXISTED. I mean, jeez, talk about jumping to conclusions! And please, if you think I'm mis-interpreting this, tell me in the comments or email walterfaltered@gmail.com


SUICIDE?


In the end of the story, the narrator (who all this time has been writing a letter to his friend) tells this friend that "it all may end in Aleppo." This is probably a reference to Shakespeare's Othello, where Othello makes a short speech before he commits suicide. 


In this speech he speaks of the time he killed a 'malignant and turban'd Turk' for having attacked a Venetian. He implicitly compares himself to this Turk--both are brown-skinned and hostile to the state of Italy--and he then stabs himself with his sword, just as he had done to the Turkish man. 

Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him thus.

So when the narrator says "it may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful," he's saying he may kill himself. At least that's the accepted meaning of the line. 

Getting Mugged in Harlem and Abercrombie's Awful Labor Practices

HARLEM FACE-OFF


The other night I had dinner with my brother and his friend, whose name is Bullet--seriously--and this friend, this Bullet, told my brother and I a story about almost getting mugged in Harlem three years ago when he'd first moved here.


Bullet had been walking down the sidewalk in the middle of the day, on the far-eastern edge of Harlem. He was carrying a duffle bag, and a man stepped out onto the sidewalk about 30 feet ahead of him, blocking his way. As Bullet approached the man, who stood near a few other guys sitting on a stoop, the man lifted his shirt and Bullet saw the handle of gun in his belt.


So, he punched him in the face, and ran. According to Bullet, the guys on the stoop were laughing. The man he'd socked in the nose wasn't angry enough to shoot, thank God.


"Why didn't you just cross the street?" I asked him.


"I don't know," he said. "I wasn't thinking"


When Bullet finished telling the story, I didn't say anything at first. Because I thought it had been an incredibly stupid thing to do, but I kind of felt bad telling him that. Luckily, he admitted it had been stupid right away.


'THE WORST JOB I EVER HAD'


After dinner, which was on Starr Street, in Bushwick, I took two trains to Fort Greene and went to my friend Clive's party. Usually his parties are small, quiet affairs, but his new roommate, a tiny, beautiful woman from New Orleans named Ava, had invited dozens of her friends over, too.


In the living room people were dancing to pop music to the point where the floor, though not super strong to begin with, was bowing and sinking in places. I chose to hang out in Clive's bedroom, where it smelled better.


;)


Clive and I went to high school in Boston together, and a guy from Southie we'd known back then was at Clive's last night, too. He's the only person I know from Southie, because people in Southie don't seem to associate with people who aren't from Southie.


So this guy from Southie, he's dating a young man named Benjamin, and No, he doesn't like to be called "Ben." Ben recently quit his job at Hollister, which is a branch of Abercrombie and Fitch--a clothing store for outdoorsy, preppy white kids.


Benjamin told us about his job.


"I had to stand by the door and ask 'What's up?' to every single person who walked in. They had people who pretended to be customers checking on us every few days, to make sure we said "What's up?" to every single person. They wouldn't let me wear my glasses while I worked. They used to put wooden tables all over the store, to force people to look over more merchandise."


The whole point of the tables in random places, apparently, was to disorient customers, similar to the way a casino has no clocks and carpets with dizzying patterns in order to induce a kind of hypnosis on gamblers. 


Benjamin went on to say that the Hollister where he worked, there was no floor plan near the elevators. It's required by law that a floor plan be posted at businesses like this: in case of a fire, especially in a strangely-designed department store that is meant to disorient you, you need to know where the stairs are. 


Benjamin continued to list the reasons he hated this job: 


"When I had to go to the bathroom, I had to radio in for a replacement. Every time I had to pee. Sometimes they wouldn't show up for 30-40 minutes, and I'd be standing there really uncomfortable."


ABERCROMBIE IN THE NEWS


I was shocked, although if you've seen Abercrombie and Fitch in the headlines recently, you might not be.


In 2010 at a Hollister store in Southampton, England, an 18-year-old girl wore a red poppy to work, and her managers told her to take it off. A red poppy (aka 'remembrance poppy') is a flower worn in memory of soldiers who have died in war. It first became popular in the US during WWI.


Abercrombie reversed its stance on the issue about 24 hours later. They were so generous, that they let employees wear red poppies until Remembrance Day. Which was the following day.


But it gets way worse:


Many of Abercrombie's clothes are made in the US territory of Saipan, an island in the South Pacific with a $1 billion garment industry that employes about 10,000 workers, most of whom are female. Many of the factory workers in Saipan testified to signing contracts that forbade them to join unions, practice religion, quit, or marry.


In the early 2000's, a class action lawsuit forced Abercrombie and Fitch, along with 25 other major retailers, to pay out $20 million to approximately 30,000 Saipan workers for pay they never received and general damages (according to attorneys).


Another headline you might have seen was the about the states of Illinois and Michigan have started lawsuits to keep Abercrombie's catalog away from teenagers, because of its (not so subtle) promotion of underage drinking and "sexually explicit" images. Which must refer to the topless boys in underwear.


In conclusion, it's worth checking before you shop to see if your favorite clothing store fits your idea of decency. There's tons of information online about this. Some links I found helpful were this report by BehindTheLabel.org [US Retailers: Responsible for the Global Sweatshop Crisis] and this article from the workers' rights group Clean Clothes.


For starters, don't trust anywhere that forces 18-year-old boys to stand on a public sidewalk in New York City with their shirts off all day long. Hollister, we're looking at you.

A Longass Hiatus and Jonathan Franzen's Twitter Ignorance

I'd like to briefly call attention to how long it's been since my last post. Only one post in all of 2011--a terrible job of keeping a blog, to be sure.


I'm back though, to complain about how The New Yorker didn't edit out Jonathan Franzen's comparison of Twitter to the Kardashians and Fox News, as examples of gaudy American things, in his article from last week's magazine.


Now, The Kardashians are crass in many ways, but Twitter surely is not. Franzen clearly doesn't use Twitter, or he would know it's the best way to get your news.


It's smart people sharing their readings lists, as someone (I forget who) once said. It's also a place where you can see kids asking "Who is Paul McCartney?" during the GRAMMYS while middle aged men cuss them out.


It's also helped free millions of people from tyranny (per Iran) but you'd have to follow the news to know that.


But I like Franzen. A lot. The Corrections and Freedom were both addictive, profound, funny novels, and his nonfiction stuff is usually pretty awesome, too. It's The New Yorker who is to blame for this foolish comment. And they're pretty good, so a mistake here and there is understandable. But God, can CondeNast hire someone under 45 years old to help fact check? Because it's kind of embarrassing.

Dancing With The Stars: We Get Boring Bristol Palin, Argentina Gets This:

Hidden Somewhere In This Chaotic Morass Of Society, Is Our Fellow Traveler Waldo