Toby Keith is not attractive, and other observations...
That's one of the many things I've learned over the last couple months, and I saved it all up for one big post, which is stupid. I should just post more often. Ah well, I'm not the most dedicated of bloggers, and probably never will be.
So to explain the title of this post, I have to back up a bit. After the semester ended, I'd been looking for work for the coming year, and I interviewed with a certain beloved part-time law school instructor at a certain nonprofit that is all about the ladies and keeping the right-wingers out of our business and whatnot, but the job wasn't going to start until mid-July, so I had to do some temping for a while. I did get the job, BTW, and I just finished my second week, and I got to work on a grant proposal already, so that was kind of fun because I've never done any grant writing. So I'd been temping all summer up until recently, and I'd never temped before, and I must say, it was frackin bizarre.
My first assignment was with Chico's. Yes, that's right, the company with the commercials with the snazzy voice-over that says, "It was a Chico's kind of day... all weekend long" (or something like that) over slow motion ladies wandering around in natural settings, wearing southwesterny-style clothing. But, it turns out Chico's was just the parent company. The store was actually an all black and white store. Black and white only. No colors. Why? I don't know. I didn't want to ask. So a fellow film studies grad student and I embarked on a week-long adventure unpacking boxes and steaming clothing to set up a new clothing store at South Side Works, surrounded by a bunch of women who frightened us with their intimate knowledge of things like the "Make It Beautiful" book, which was the visual bible for the store. And while Nathan and I were steaming away, there were training sessions going on for the new associates, and at one point in the training, a boom box came out and "I'm Every Woman" was played, to psyche up the ladies for the selling of black and white clothing! Good times.
But that's enough about that. I was paid. It's over with, although it did cause me to have a few flashbacks to my month-long stint at Eddie Bauer. They were opening a new store in the Seattle equivalent of South Side Works (maybe a little better than South Side Works in that the place had been there for about fifty years and there were at least a few smaller, locally-owned stores that remained while Eddie Bauer, The Gap, etc. took over), and I was an undergrad at the nearby University of Washington, so I decided to get a part-time job. It remains to this day, my first and last retail sales experience. I'm not quite sure how I lasted an entire month given the traumatic orientation I had to go through, where Eddie Bauer "beliefs" were chanted, and some sort of cheer that had to do with the Eddie Bauer T.E.A.M. was performed. And I had a manager (the hellish retail manager prototype) who said the typical nonhuman, managery things like, "Do you think you can work a little more on your folding, the way we taught you with the folding board? Mmm-kay? Super. Thanks."
But my next assignment also involved South Side Works, and was perhaps an even more bizarre experience (if that's possible), and it brings me to the title of this post. So my temping buddy and I were selected to help out with a test screening for a film called Broken Flowers, starring TOBY KEITH in his acting debut. Yikes. It was sooo bad. And, seeing Toby on the big screen, it didn't take long to realize that he is very unattractive. I usually change the channel or look away during those Ford truck ads, so I'd never really looked at his face before. But I won't go into the plot of the movie because I just don't want to bother. Basically, it was a Lifetime movie. In fact, during the focus group after the screening (my job was to take notes), this guy says, "It reminded me of one of those Lifetime movies." So I'm thinking that he intends this as a disparaging remark, but I was wrong, because then he says, "We love Lifetime movies. We watch them all the time."
After the Toby Keith Experience, I began a long assignment with PNC, in the finance dept. -- your basic freezing cold, climate-controlled, cubicleland, stare-at-an-excel-spreadsheet-all-day-long nightmare. But, I did get to have lunch with the frightenedmonkey almost every day, and it's kind of fun to be downtown in the summertime (except for all the hideous tennis shoe/nude pantyhose sightings). But the best part of the PNC job was the florescent orange trucker-style baseball hat that sat on the shelf of my cubicle the entire time, which read, in big black letters: "FLOOR WARDEN." Oh, and one woman had a Toby Keith calendar. So I'm pretty sure that there will be many more Toby sightings in my future.
And that's how I spent my summer blog hiatus.
So to explain the title of this post, I have to back up a bit. After the semester ended, I'd been looking for work for the coming year, and I interviewed with a certain beloved part-time law school instructor at a certain nonprofit that is all about the ladies and keeping the right-wingers out of our business and whatnot, but the job wasn't going to start until mid-July, so I had to do some temping for a while. I did get the job, BTW, and I just finished my second week, and I got to work on a grant proposal already, so that was kind of fun because I've never done any grant writing. So I'd been temping all summer up until recently, and I'd never temped before, and I must say, it was frackin bizarre.
My first assignment was with Chico's. Yes, that's right, the company with the commercials with the snazzy voice-over that says, "It was a Chico's kind of day... all weekend long" (or something like that) over slow motion ladies wandering around in natural settings, wearing southwesterny-style clothing. But, it turns out Chico's was just the parent company. The store was actually an all black and white store. Black and white only. No colors. Why? I don't know. I didn't want to ask. So a fellow film studies grad student and I embarked on a week-long adventure unpacking boxes and steaming clothing to set up a new clothing store at South Side Works, surrounded by a bunch of women who frightened us with their intimate knowledge of things like the "Make It Beautiful" book, which was the visual bible for the store. And while Nathan and I were steaming away, there were training sessions going on for the new associates, and at one point in the training, a boom box came out and "I'm Every Woman" was played, to psyche up the ladies for the selling of black and white clothing! Good times.
But that's enough about that. I was paid. It's over with, although it did cause me to have a few flashbacks to my month-long stint at Eddie Bauer. They were opening a new store in the Seattle equivalent of South Side Works (maybe a little better than South Side Works in that the place had been there for about fifty years and there were at least a few smaller, locally-owned stores that remained while Eddie Bauer, The Gap, etc. took over), and I was an undergrad at the nearby University of Washington, so I decided to get a part-time job. It remains to this day, my first and last retail sales experience. I'm not quite sure how I lasted an entire month given the traumatic orientation I had to go through, where Eddie Bauer "beliefs" were chanted, and some sort of cheer that had to do with the Eddie Bauer T.E.A.M. was performed. And I had a manager (the hellish retail manager prototype) who said the typical nonhuman, managery things like, "Do you think you can work a little more on your folding, the way we taught you with the folding board? Mmm-kay? Super. Thanks."
But my next assignment also involved South Side Works, and was perhaps an even more bizarre experience (if that's possible), and it brings me to the title of this post. So my temping buddy and I were selected to help out with a test screening for a film called Broken Flowers, starring TOBY KEITH in his acting debut. Yikes. It was sooo bad. And, seeing Toby on the big screen, it didn't take long to realize that he is very unattractive. I usually change the channel or look away during those Ford truck ads, so I'd never really looked at his face before. But I won't go into the plot of the movie because I just don't want to bother. Basically, it was a Lifetime movie. In fact, during the focus group after the screening (my job was to take notes), this guy says, "It reminded me of one of those Lifetime movies." So I'm thinking that he intends this as a disparaging remark, but I was wrong, because then he says, "We love Lifetime movies. We watch them all the time."
After the Toby Keith Experience, I began a long assignment with PNC, in the finance dept. -- your basic freezing cold, climate-controlled, cubicleland, stare-at-an-excel-spreadsheet-all-day-long nightmare. But, I did get to have lunch with the frightenedmonkey almost every day, and it's kind of fun to be downtown in the summertime (except for all the hideous tennis shoe/nude pantyhose sightings). But the best part of the PNC job was the florescent orange trucker-style baseball hat that sat on the shelf of my cubicle the entire time, which read, in big black letters: "FLOOR WARDEN." Oh, and one woman had a Toby Keith calendar. So I'm pretty sure that there will be many more Toby sightings in my future.
And that's how I spent my summer blog hiatus.
posted by stephie @ Saturday, August 05, 2006
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