Do Not Write Below This Line by MyX

When I walked into the office this morning, it was for my annual review.
“Good Morning” I chirped enthusiastically, unbuttoning my long coat and straightening my tie.
“Good Morning Michael.” She replied in a hoarse woke-up-late kind of voice.
I looked at all the papers strewn throughout the muddled office.
“Ah” I sighed proficiently and picking up an assessment form.
“Its that time of the year already, is it?”
“Yes.” She replied, tucking her lips.
I turned to hang my trench on the coat rack.
“Setting the example as usual I see. A team leader. The real deal right here, in the overabundance of flesh.”
“You can call me fat all you want to.”
“Fat. So, what did you organize the office with this morning? A leaf blower?”
“Have a seat” she said sullenly, already with a tired look on her face that matched her defeated eyes. She pretended to ignore the fact I was the single largest trial of temperance that she would ever face in her work life.
She poured herself into a cheap wrinkled skirt from Fashion Bug revealing her fat crinkled legs, and put on a little more concealer than normal to patch up the chubby chinks in her cheeks. She must have selected these clothes for one of the two following reasons.
(A) would be that her yoga instructor took a time out with her for a coffee and motivational speech to boost her confidence, in a fit of guilt that he wasn’t helping her cause in any other way.
(B) would be that its more effective to look professional on the day that it is your job to simply piss people off.

It doesn’t work for me.
“You look lovely today.”
I fixed myself a cup of coffee and sat down.

Please don’t cross your legs.

“So as you know..” she resumed, crossing her enormously stout legs and resting her hefty arms across her lap bearing a clipboard. “This is your annual eval and we will be discussing your work performance to determine whether or not you remain an asset to the company”
“Cut the shit.” I said firmly, slurping a sip from her best-boss mug.
“This is your corporate opportunity to sit there like an over-insulated trial of endurance for that rickety swivel chair that should be your highest paid associate for risking its life for you every day.”
“Lets be serious”
“This is your corporate opportunity to seat all of your little ducklings and take pot shots at them, prostrating their dignity only to raffle them back onto your sales floor to resume pushing your sickeningly inflated merchandise in exchange for their primitive wages.”

“Yeah whatever.” She spouted outside of character, perhaps to thwart my itinerary of thinking and trivialize the fact that I’ve returned dialogue this early in the review at all. She knew this was going to be an absolutely excruciating experience.
“Could you please uncross your legs? I feel kind of uncomfortable.”
“Why?”
“Could you just…please?” After I begged and pleaded, she complied.
“Thank you.” I thanked her, swallowing hard.
“I can already see that You’ve chosen to make this more difficult than it has to be.”
I interlocked my fingers and sat back coyly, smiling a smug grin, watching her quizzically.
“Please continue.”.
“A woman last week claimed that you were rude to her.”
“Big surprise. The name?” I said grabbing a notebook and equipping a pen.
“Why? Does it really matter?”
She preferred reasoning with the ceiling to recalibrate her patience, rather than look at me in the eye. She would do this periodically to excuse herself from the game of word turf that interrupts her snack cake sessions.
“Well” I said, still smirking “How in the hell am I going to suck her ass if I don’t even have a name to scream out?”
“Diane Langford.”
“Ahh, Miss Langford” I muttered drifting back and reflecting.

Miss Langford was a tall, blonde, tan eggo baker that was a regular in our store. One day she came up to the cash counter wearing pink exclusively. She even had hot pink lipstick on, and a purse to match. I looked around and respired hard to try and detect the presence of a small ridiculous looking dog, but found nothing but a cart full of needless sundries. I studied closer, following her leather arms lodged in her purse up to her revolting wrinkled face that truly revealed a fraying woman well past 40. She was always buying facial creams and special swabs for her puffy eye lids. And she would never leave without buying another stack of those get-young-quick magazines with lewd messages surrounding the stick figure models on the covers. I just couldn’t take my eyes off that lipstick amidst her fake bake completion.
Nor could I refrain from saying exactly what was on my mind.
“And I thought Legally Blonde 12 came out next year!”

“Yah!” I said laughing. “What a bimbo”
“That bimbo was pretty displeased with your behavior, maybe more than I am”
“And your both equally displeasing on the eyes, maybe the two of you should have dinn__err..some coffee together and talk about the mean ol associates who don’t give a damn about conformity. Did you find her off of one of those pay dating sites on the internet? Oh yeah, and while I’m talking you’re pretty fat.” I popped a piece of Bubble Yum in my mouth. She returned her sullen concentration to her paper work and pulled the next complaint record.
“Wow” I said looking at the pile of them next to her.. “Are those all for me? So who’s next? This is rather exciting you know. recollecting these off kilter events!”
“Michael, these are a little more than off kilter. You called Beverly Milford fat to her face.”
“ ‘Fat to her face’ huh? Anything about meeting me out next to the swing set after recess so she can hit me in the face with a chunk of play doe?”
Again I sat back and sifted through the amusing filing cabinet that I kept in the side-splitting excuse for my own mind.

Miss Milford was a sweet old dame in her late 50s. A widow with bad knees, a breathing condition and a severe case of obesity. “Boy” she would say when picking up and item “I remember when___” (I never listened past that point).
One evening I humored her and heeded words.
“Boy” she said picking up a kit kat bar, “I remember when these were twice the size, long ago. And it seems like every time I come in here they get smaller and smaller”
“Ever think, Miss Milford that its because every time you come in here you’re bigger and bigger?”

“This isn’t funny!” she scowled, snapping me out of my elusive cloud.
her voice cracked her pitch higher, volume louder.
“What about my friend Rene?”
“Oh yeah, her. Now why’d you have to go and name off something so unpleasant?”

Rene was one of her crotch rotted lesbian friends from the eastern part of the city. She came in the store one night where I’d seen her for the first time. She had a cute face yet a freakishly muscular, manly body that made you completely forget about it. Her tits protruded a foot from her chest and angled down as though she were smuggling watermelons. It forced me to remind myself that we didn’t have a produce department. She spoke up and asked where the Tampons were. Her voice was as deep as her mannish body would imply. I took another look at her insanely voluptuous (for lack of more extreme words) tits.
“So you must work at Hooters, huh? You must be the….bouncer…..”

“Ohhh…what’s that there?” I spit my gum into the trashcan next to her from afar.
“Another one?”
“Miss Wheeler has been our customer here for a long time.”
“Too long.” I added.
“She’s put thousands of dollars into our pharmacy every year.”
I caught the ‘oh-no-not-again’ glance she shot me just before I drifted off again.

Mrs. Wheeler. Ooh, Miss Wheeler. I feel even more sorrowful for this particular individual, known for her incoherent babbling, drooling and similarly disgusting blunders. I couldn’t resist trying to advise her one particular day. She had approached the counter looking worse than ever before. She shook uncontrollably spouting random gibberish over the sound of her clicking dentures. Her drivel collected itself in a pile that trailed from the corner of her mouth like a fountain. Over a 10 minute period she somehow managed to grip 6 of her prescriptions and several other OTCs and place them down to the counter to be rung out. She then greeted me as her grandson that recently came back from Iraq.
“Perhaps you should find a new hobby, Mrs. Wheeler. Why not try knitting?”

“That is just cruel! And from here, I don’t even want to get into your unnecessary crudeness, mood swings and anger problems.”
“WHAT ANGER PROBLEMS?” I screamed with a revolting cackle to follow.
“Where are you going with all of this? I certainly hope you didn’t work all night on this.” I said.
“Mr. Montgomery”
“No, all of this…what are you trying to accomplish here?”
“Just let me do my review.” She asserted her authority. Authority that had been granted to her in exchange for what must have been one of hell of a blow job on multiple accounts and occasions.
“Mr. Montgomery came to me personally to address your unprofessional attitude”
“Ohh…so this is a profession now?” I said, still wearing a proud smirk.

Mr. Montgomery was your every day ridiculous old man. He was a particularly mean old bastard to tell the truth. He complained incessantly to me about the price of prune juice and the other items that he regularly stopped in for. He always reeked of sardine oil and cat piss. He normally wore overalls that exhibited his large man tits, skinny frame and silver chest hair about 2 inches long. The day in question however, he must have left them in the “worsh”. He showed up in a stained wife beater, polyester trousers and I-shit-you-not bungee cords to illicitly uphold them.
“I haven’t seen prices this bad since the depression” he would say. This particular afternoon, fed up with the sheer repetition of it all, I spoke up and said..
“You would think a man that survived the depression wouldn’t get so worked up by a little inflation, you’ve been watching this country go to hell for 80 years now, and do you honestly expect me to risk my job and revise prices for you just because you swallowed a few squirrels back in the 1930s? Go shit yourself or something, old fucker.”
I remembered exactly how the circumference of his eyes swelled like that of a cartoon character.

“Michael.” She said, placing her hand on my shoulder?
“Yes?”
“You know I’ve been training Derek.”
“Is that the happy little guy with the burger flipping communications degree?”
“Please, let me continue.” She said still gripping my shoulder.
“Please remove your pudgy appendages from my shoulder and listen to me you disgusting fat body. You run this place like you are directing a god damn porno. Your own associates throw Reece cups at you whenever you bluff a form of discipline. The truth of the matter is, everyone here knows that you don’t know the slightest fuck of what it is you’re doing. How dare you question MY productivity when all you do is sit there like a growth out of that damn swivel chair, lining up coke cans and ho-ho wrappers, pretending to produce a productive work environment? And did I mention that you were fat?”
“Michael, you obviously have no interest in maintaining your job”
“Fat.”
“You bring this place down with your negative attitude”
“Fatty.”
“You don’t treat my associates fairly or my customers with respect.”
“Fatso.”
“It is clear to me what needs to be done.”
“DON’T EAT ME!”
“…”
“….?!”
“You’re Fi___”
“__uit.”

MyX