As many of you know, I released the second Elsie W book a little more than a week ago, so now it's time for a little bit of a sneak peak for you to see what you should be buying for yourself and your friends!
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To purchase for the Kindle or in print form:
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enjoy!
Elsie W. and I were the
only two women in the office at Stuff, Installed, a fact that never ceased to
annoy me. The sales guys called her my “partner in crime.” I think they did that just to get me riled up.
See, there were a few things about Elsie that…well, made me want to distance
myself from her as much as humanly possible.
Elsie
W. was a non stop eating machine and a complete disaster mess of a human. She
worked an odd shift, Monday through Thursday eleven to eight, and then
Saturdays she worked eight to five. Maybe her odd work hours were a
contributing factor to her social and hygienic quirks, or maybe she worked
those odd hours because she was socially and hygienically off kilter. When I
worked with her during the week, she spent the bulk of her time gathering,
preparing, eating, and relieving herself of food. She got hired at Stuff,
Installed about six weeks before I did, back in the summer of 2011. She told me
by the fall she’d gained eighteen pounds. Three months, 18 pounds. Given the
amount of food she shoved down her gullet in that time, I was surprised it
wasn’t a bigger number. I’ve battled weight my whole life, so I’m to the point
I don’t eat that much during the day. Just watching her pack it away made me
gain weight.
I’m
getting ahead of myself. Let me see if I can start closer to the beginning of
things so you don’t think I’m a horrible person telling stories about a poor
little old lady.
Shortly after I began working at Stuff,
Installed, the company moved to a new location. It was a beautiful office, with
a wide open showroom. Everything was shiny, new, and clean.
And
then Elsie moved in.
When
I say she was a non-stop eating machine what I mean is that from the time she
walked through the door with her rolling cooler and four purses, most of which
contained food, she started eating and
she didn’t stop eating, as far as I know, until she drove home at night. Then
again, I’ve seen the front seat of her car. There’s a very real chance she
didn’t stop eating even then.
When
you work in an office, most of you know, snacking typically consists of a small
bag of something that isn’t sticky, doesn’t melt, and won’t interfere with your
work, especially if you need to be on the phone. A snack is something you can
eat quickly, you can eat it walking, and you don’t run the risk of spilling it
on a surface that needs to stay clean.
Elsie
had no such snacking guidelines. A typical morning for her involved arriving at
11:07 (Her start time was 11, but she
was never, ever on time.), making one phone call, (to prove to NBM, our boss,
just what a dedicated employee she was) and then heading to the galley kitchen
to make the first “snack” of the day. This snack usually had three parts: salad, wilting under a layer of heavy
dressing; a protein, chicken legs, pork chops, meatloaf; and a hearty helping
of mashed potatoes.
Just
to contrast, back then I got to work at 7:30. My breakfast prior to arriving is
usually a bowl of cereal or a bagel eaten quickly over the kitchen sink while
yelling to my youngest child that I was LEAVING IN FIVE MINUTES and if she
wanted a ride to school she’d better turn off the Fall Out boy CD and get a
move on. I ate lunch, usually some sandwich and fruit I packed for myself, at
1:30. Between those two times, I consume two cups of coffee. Can someone
explain why I continue to have a weight problem?
I
digress.
So it
took Elsie roughly half an hour to prepare this snack and eat it at her desk. She
then shoved the mostly empty plastic container back into the fridge where she also
stored, just in case she gets peckish around noon, a six pack of yogurt, a head
of lettuce, four bottle of salad dressing, a loaf of bread, a large jar of
peanut butter (She never had any jelly. She’d steal NBM’s home- made jam. He
never figured out why he couldn’t remember eating so much of it.) and a pan of
brownies.
That’s
just the fridge. In her desk she kept two family sized bags of snack chips and
a complete series of two liter bottles of soda pop.
Do
not misunderstand. Elsie W was not what most would think of as obese. She was
heavy, sure. But she was heavy in a sort of cute old lady way (she was in her
early sixties, not at all old) She was just a complete, total non stop eating
machine. Like sharks, you know, if they stop moving they die. Elsie, I think,
if she stopped eating, she’d die. At the very least, she wasn’t taking a
chance.
That
Elsie treated the office as her own home was a source of constant irritation
for NBM, our boss. He was a very tidy fellow, and he expected those who work
for him to be tidy as well. Our shop, where the guys who install the stuff we
sell store their stuff, is clean. How clean? The fire inspector told me
recently it was the cleanest place he’d been to that month.
No
one can say the same for any space Elsie occupied. You knew immediately that you were in her
presence, or at least on her trail, by the marks she’d leave, and the clouds of
fruit flies hovering nearby.
I
wasn’t aware of this when I first started working with her, however. At first I
thought she was just an odd, lonely woman who liked her snack food. As a new
employee, I wanted to make a good impression on those around me, so I kept a
candy dish on my desk and filled it with those little chocolate kisses. Everyone
was a fan of that candy. Especially Elsie.
Elsie
thought of the candy dish as her own personal snack machine. Our desks were
about six feet apart and she found a reason multiple times a day to roll her
chair over to my desk and scoop up a red press on nail claw full of kisses and
then roll back to her desk.
Elsie’s
job at Stuff, Installed was that of ISP, Inside Sales Person. She was to make
at least one hundred outgoing calls per day, mostly following up on customers
who had had an estimate done by one of the sales guys, but hadn’t purchased. These
calls were calls Rebounds, and if she managed to get one of these people to
agree to take another look at their estimate, and if they did buy the stuff we
install, she would get a bonus. In short, not only was she paid a nice hourly
wage to make one hundred phone calls, she got a bonus when one of those phone
calls goes well.
To
make one hundred phone calls in an eight hour day is not that hard, especially
when that’s all that is required of you. My job at Stuff, Installed was CSA,
Customer Service Assistant. This was a broad brush of a job description that
encompassed basic office work, filing, scheduling both sales and service
appointments, helping the PM with the scheduling of installations, filling building
permit applications forms, scheduling building inspections, and yes, making
outgoing sales calls. As I got better at my job I sort of became the office
mom, helping the sales guys find the correct address for a sales call when they
were lost because Elsie had typed in the wrong address. Some days the install
guys would have me help them placate a grumpy customer. I have a great phone
voice and, apparently, a lot of patience. NBM liked to push small
administrative things to me, since he was very busy watching the weather or
baseball on his cell phone. By the time I’d worked at Stuff, Installed a year,
there wasn’t a piece of paper in the building that didn’t cross my desk at
least once.
Oh
yeah, and I still was supposed to make as close to one hundred outgoing sales
calls a day as I could.
But
this isn’t about me. This is about Elsie, and how her job, her ONLY job was to
make one hundred sales calls a day.
To do
that, one would expect she’d be at her desk most of the day. Not so. She spent
quality time in the bathroom, typically making personal phone calls. Or she’d
be in the galley kitchen, making food. Or she’d be wandering through the shop
to the neighbor’s office where she took advantage of their very cheap soda pop
machine prices.
The
good news was that we always knew how to find her. We simply followed the trail
of bread crumbs, food stains, coffee spills, or, thanks to my chocolate kisses,
those little paper flags. And it didn’t matter where the stain, crumb trail,
spills, or kisses flags started, you always knew exactly where the trail would
end: at Elsie’s desk.
Looking
back, I like to think Elsie left the trails so she wouldn’t get lost in the
office. When I’m feeling charitable, I like to think of her as a confused lady
who liked her snack food.
And
then I think about things like how she loved to microwave trout for her lunch,
making the entire office smell like a fish hatchery, and I remember why a book
like this had to be written.
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