By Chloe Bohne · April 13, 2010
One of my most important duties is running errands. Most errands are office related, like picking up the color ink we are low on, or grabbing that special cheese that office mate #4 prefers. These errands I don’t mind so much; I get to walk around, enjoy a change of scenery for a bit, and breathe in some of that fresh Los Angeles air. There is one errand that I dread; the one that never fails like a recurring nightmare – the cell phone errand.
Being a tyrant requires certain personality traits, the most prevalent of them being an inability of keeping one’s cell phone out of harm’s way. The tyrant’s cell phone is the key to their power, without it, they are infants who can do no more than wail about how their favorite toy is broken and that it is everyone’s fault except their own.
This only happens in the beginning of the week, after an insane party weekend. I hear the ‘discussion’ about the lack of phone before ever approached about it. Missy will come in and scream at the office manager who was unable to replace her phone over the weekend. In desperation, Wendy, the office manager, will beg me to run to the cell phone store and straighten it all out for her. Missy has always been really good at distracting others from their work to handle some crisis of hers that has immediately been bumped up to top priority, my top priority. After Wendy writes out a post-it with all the information that I will need to solve the problem, she pins it to my shirt and I am off like a little school girl with the note from my teacher to my mother.
We have all had to deal with the agony of the mobile phone store: the jotting down of your name on a list to be called by the one person who is working while the rest of the staff appear to be having the time of their lives behind the counter doing nothing, the older gentleman who tries to strike up a conversation with you about how he has the same phone as you and he, “has had that problem [Missy’s problem] once,” or, finally getting helped by the one new employee who has no idea what they are doing. Good fuckin’ times. A couple of times, I even fixed the problem while I was waiting for the “newbie” to get help! So badda bing, badda boom, done, right?
By the time I get back to the office, the replacement phone that Wendy was trying to get over the weekend shows up and Missy just loves it! New priority: to transfer all the information from the phone that I just repaired, to the new shiny one. I go back and experience the whole ordeal once again.
This happens at least once every month. And only on a Monday. And only to Missy. And never to the other interns. Anybody ever see Groundhog’s Day? This has gotta be some sorta sick joke!
