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Health & Fitness

Waiting For The Third Shoe To Drop

Chris Capelle, Neighbor
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Sorry for the delay.

Yes, it’s been a long time, nearly a year and a half since my last blog post, something that I’m sure upsets all four people who actually read my column in the past. The point of today’s missive is to follow up on a piece I wrote back in July 2012, a story about people from the past suddenly coming out of the woodwork. Check it out here.

The gist of that tale is that I encountered two people from the Jurassic Period – people I hadn’t seen in over twenty years in both cases. And because people like things to happen in neat bundles of three, I was left hanging whether I would run into a third person from my past, and if it happened, which way would it tip the scales? (I was 1 for 2: the first person I was glad to hear from, the second one, not so much!) So number three made an appearance last week (only 21 months later), and stemmed from a posting I made on Freecycle, a forum which I (unfortunately) use my real name as my handle. Suddenly in my inbox, there was a message from another person I hadn’t heard from in a couple of decades – a coworker from my first “real” job who had read my post.

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Well, your first “real” job is like your first “real” girlfriend; the goal is not to try to stick around long enough to collect the gold watch or to get married; instead it’s to get you from Point A (having no practical skills in that area) to Point B (gaining some experience you can hopefully use for better opportunities that present themselves in the future). And for me, most of the memories of that first job are in a neatly wrapped package, sitting on a shelf somewhere back in the dark corner of my mind’s storage unit. I’m fully aware that going in and opening that box would stir up things, stuff that was forgotten for a reason. You think I’m kidding? Go on Facebook and look up your first serious relationship and you’ll quickly realize that your memory has an uncanny knack for smoothing over a lot of faults.

Which reminds me of the time I ran into one of my college roommates. We talked a little about what we were currently doing, and then he said, “I remember that you used to play a lot of Pac-Man.”

Great. We lived in a 10x12 room together for year, and that’s my legacy? Not all the stuff we did together, not the fact that I helped elevate his taste in music or not even the time I ignored the “rubber band on the doorknob signal” and walked in on him and a girl, who quickly got herself composed and walked out (and the argument between us that followed, in which he confessed he was a virgin and that I had wrecked his best chance to date), but Pac-Man? Seriously, that’ll be on my tombstone? Born this date, died this date, and underneath “Played a lot of Pac-Man in 1985.” Wow. Lesson learned; you probably don’t want to know what these minor players in your life remember about you.

That’s because it works both ways. That kid who barfed during The Pledge of Allegiance in second grade? That’s his legacy. Never mind it was so long ago that Nixon was in the White House at the time and that today he’s a good father, a successful businessman and a highly respected community member. None of that matters - just ask any of the students who scrambled to the other side of the classroom when it all went down. That moment sealed his fate forever.

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So back to the story – last week, I got an email out of the blue from an ex-coworker from my first job. Fine, it’s nobody I would’ve even remembered, except his name was VERY similar to a classic sitcom character. I was at that job for more than a year before he joined the company, and then there was a mass reorganization and I moved on to a new job, so our paths only crossed for maybe nine months.

Hard to imagine, but in those days there was no Facebook or LinkedIn to stay connected. Even AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe were pretty much in the future, so unless you ran into a B-List player at the mall or something, you never saw or heard from ex-coworkers again. So he joined the list of people from my first job that I would probably never see again. But there was more to the story than just the first job.

Fast forward two years. After being at my second job for over a year, I got a call from the same guy – he was now working there too. He saw my name on a company directory and invited me to “have lunch with him.”

OK. Problem was that I was beyond broke that week, so even running to the deli would take more than 50% of the cash I had on hand. So I had a couple of ideas; I could say something like “let’s meet in the lunchroom” and that way I could brownbag it and save a few bucks, but I didn’t want to look like a broke loser. Second thought; we could go to a restaurant and I could put the meal on my American Express card and I would worry about paying when the bill came.

So I decided to go ahead with Plan “B” and take my chances. Besides, he invited me, so he might end up paying, right? Wishful thinking on my part it turns out. When I showed up to meet this guy, he whips out a brown bag lunch and said, “I’m broke, so let’s eat here, OK?”

Thanks for warning me in advance there, Chet. Now I don’t have a thing to eat, so I’m forced to spend six (of my last ten) bucks on a sandwich and ice tea from the deli just for the privilege of eating lunch with you. And the worst part of all of this (besides my diminished financial situation) was that I suddenly remembered he wasn’t the most interesting guy I’ve ever worked with. All I recall about that lunch was that he seemed to complain about everybody he worked with at every job he ever had. But the good news is that things didn’t work out with him at that place either, and one day they canned him and hustled him out of the building and that was that. Shortly thereafter, I moved on to bigger and better things myself and was happy that he didn’t follow me to job number three. And that was the end of the story – until last week. And now my batting average has dropped to .333.

 Note to self: Change Freecycle handle.



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