Guffaw, Guffaw! And Technical Advice! I'm so Employable!

I applied at Fetch! Pet Care last weekend. Bruce was looking for jobs in the St. Louis area (you know, for fun. La-la-la, I'm not listening to your begging us to move, la-la-la) and saw an ad on Craig's List for the company. Of course he sent it to me, and when I saw they had an outpost right here in the Patch, I applied right away.

Ok, so I left the page with the "Click here to Apply" link on it open on my computer for two days while I screwed up the courage to open myself up to rejection. I'm suave like that. But eventually, I applied.

I just got a call from one of the women there. It was approximately the most hysterical and odd phone conversations of my life. Let me say first, I'm not a good person to talk to on the phone. Unless I've known you for a while and talked to you many times in person, you may not want to even attempt to talk to me on the telephone. I don't understand it, either. At work, I'm fine. I can talk on the phone all day long at work, call people even. When it's personal, though, that's when I get into trouble. It's like an asthma attack. With hysterics. And muscle-tension. The first symptom is my shoulders - they crawl up into my ears. And I adopt an insane grin. If I wore this grin in public, people would cross the street to avoid me. I'm manic. There's this giant moist hairball that rises in my throat, until I can hardly breathe, and the manic laughter barely escapes, and my voice goes an octave higher than it should be. Linus runs in fear.

This phone call was worse than most, because it was a potential employer on the other end.

She called to let me know she'd gotten my application and said that she would have emailed me, but I didn't leave my email address on the application. My answer, "I, um.. Forgot?" led to much Guffawing laughter on her end. And because I'm manic on the freaking phone, I Guffawed right along with her. It was way awkward. Let me tell you.

Then she asked how I heard about their business, and I told her that I was looking online and happened across it. I told her that I saw an ad for the St. Louis company, and noticed on their webpage that they had a business here in the Patch as well. That was great! But then she noticed that my phone number has a St. Louis area code, and wondered why. So I told her about us having Vonage and how much it rocks if you've got high-speed internet. She told me about how she'd had a similar service, and how it wasn't the most reliable, and I reassured her that Vonage was incredibly reliable, and tried to explain about our apartment complex, and the free wireless internet they offer. She asked me if the internet was a service of Vonage, and I told her no. She said, "Well, that's good, because otherwise, everytime that Vonage went down, you couldn't get online!" and Guffawed some more. I Guffawed right with her. 'Wouldn't that be funny?' I asked myself. 'Wouldn't it just frustrate you to no end?'

And then we conversed about my email address, and she got confused about the '@gmail' portion. "What's G-mail?" she asked. So I explained it to her - large storage, free, etc. She told me her Yahoo! address had 1Gig of storage. I speculated that Yahoo! had upped their storage capacity to compete with Gmail. She asked me how much storage Gmail had, and I answered her after logging in and checking. "2,684 megabytes," I answered.

"So, that's like 2 Gigs, right?"

"Uh.. I don't know... Well, it's a LOT!" I answered convincingly.

She proceeded to Guffaw a whole lot more, and I Guffawed right along with her. We concluded that we're not "math people", but that it didn't matter so much.

She's not hiring at this time, but she will keep my application on file for the near future - they're foreseeing a big rise in need in the dog-watching industry here in the Patch.

I make fun of myself only, you understand. By Guffaw, I mean that she laughed with her whole body, and I could tell over the phone. She's entirely the sort of boss I'd be happier than a pig in shit to work with, and I hope that I gave her the same impression. In any case, she won't forget me soon. That's for sure.