Marissa Flaxbart

Closing Up Shop

Yesterday, the North Michigan Avenue Apple Store closed. The massive, domineering, four-story building at the corner of Michigan and Huron was one of the first flagship stores in Apple Retail. It was two blocks away from the condo I shared with my dad during my last years in Chicago. And for five years, starting in 2005, it was where I worked. 

Before I started working there, I remember going in and marveling at the architecture, the majestic glass staircase, the astonishing see-through catwalk that connected the north and south sides of the second floor, and even the 50-seat theater that would eventually become my professional domain. But more than anything, I marveled at the employees, who seemed to know everything about everything about Apple products. I'd been a Mac user practically since birth, holding on during years where I was literally bullied because of it (I know this is hard to imagine, but I swear it's true; the Nineties were a strange, simpler time). The idea of joining the ranks of these geniuses (both those with the official "Genius" title and the hip, affable nerds who populated the sales floor) was appealing to me as I entered the job market with no idea how I would forge a meaningful, desired career out of my liberal arts degree. I wanted to be an actress and a writer. Instead, I became a theater presenter.

During my time at the store, I learned that no one there actually knew everything. Including me. I learned that it is possible for a team of 200 people to run like near-clockwork, but it takes a lot of time and energy and cooperation. I learned that asking questions is the best way to find answers. I learned that young people and older people have very different attitudes toward learning about new software, that pop singers usually want their bottled water to be room temperature, and that one woman can, in fact, set up an entire soundstage by herself if she has a big enough dolly. I learned that finagling a team of seven part-time instructors with varying availability and skillsets into a 12-hour schedule of hourly workshops is practically a full-time job, and I learned the outer limits of iCal's capability. I learned that if you spend all day doing a job that isn't well defined or understood, some people will start to wonder what you do all day. At worst, they may mistake your self-sufficiency for lack of transparency and even laziness. Under these uncurious and uncommunicative conditions, when things go right, you will be "just doing your job," and if things go wrong, you will be the only one to blame. 

After I quit my job at the store, I learned that leaving a job can feel exactly like a breakup. A break up from a partner who have been good to me for a long time but who was never really right for me, and who, at the end, had begun to treat me like shit and take all I'd given it for granted. A break up that was totally necessary, absolutely for the best, and yet even thinking about some of the details of those final months can make my blood boil. My life is so much righter, I am so much healthier as a free woman, and yet I'm still not totally over it. This might be because in this break-up, the store got to keep our home, our job, our shared friends.

And now that "home" is gone. 

I avoided the store for most of the two years I stayed in Chicago without it. I didn't want to see it. It was hard, too, because it was massive, domineering, and two blocks from where I lived. Next time I visit my dad, who still lives two blocks away from the corner of Michigan and Huron, I wonder what will be at that corner. Will it be covered over in drop cloths (like so much of downtown Chicago was, especially during the recession, when skyscrapers were halted midway through construction)? Or will that Apple-shaped window still gaze out at me, a skull's socket now, the formerly buzzing world behind that eye now lifeless and hollow? 

Wow, that got pretty macabre. Like I said, I'm still holding on to some shit.

There's a part of me that wants to go into detail about the shit, but I know it's pointless. It is a FACT that my job at NMA was fucking cool. I got to meet amazing people and put on amazing shows and speak extemporaneously about software and hardware that had just been released earlier that day. I got to wear a wireless headset microphone and be on high-profile conference calls and get de-labeled bottles of water for celebrity guests. I once got to go to New York and was put up at the Hotel Gansevoort. And sure, I had so little money in my bank account that I couldn't afford to pay for my cab back to LaGuardia, but the irony makes the story that much better. So I'm going to close this post, and this chapter, by detailing the big lessons I learned at this first job that I still carry with me:

1. Assume Positive Intent
   
   This sentiment is a key life strategy masquerading as a corporate policy.  Whether your dealing with a coworker, a customer, a family member, or a stranger, it's a lot easier if you work from a base assumption that people aren't trying to be shitty. Most of the time, we're all just trying our best. This isn't just a nice thing to do for others, it also shields us from unnecessary hurt feelings and misplaced ire. 
   
   
2. Under-Promise and Over-Deliver
   
   Making claims about what we can do is easy. Doing things is often hard. Let's say, realistically, I need a week to finish a project. If I tell you it will take a week and a half, but I get it in in seven days, everybody's happy and everybody looks good. If I told you I'd have it by tomorrow, suddenly that same time frame looks like a failure.
    
   
3. "I Don't Know, Let's Find Out"
   
   This was the reason I thought every employee knew it all. If you don't have an answer, there's no need to fret; all you really need to know is who to ask. If that person doesn't know either, together you can find a third person. This was a part of the culture at the store, and it dovetailed nicely with the spririt of curiousity and critical analysis that was fostered in me during college at University of Chicago (crescat scientia vita excolatur, amiright?).
   
   
4. Almost everyone thinks they're "the worst" when it comes to technology.
   
   In day to day life, it often seems like everyone's a tech whiz and your'e the only one who's confused. I'm here to tell you, most of that is pure posturing. In the face of a professional, at their wits' end, most people suddenly claim complete ignorance. I can't tell you how many conversations started with someone telling me how "bad" at technology they were. It must have been a defense mechanism, "you can't laugh at me if I've told you I suck." You don't suck. Technology changes every week. We're all just out here learning this shit as we go. Which brings me to...
   
   
5. It's a lot easier to learn something when you truly believe you can.
   
   In my capacity as theater presenter, I also got to lead Youth Programs at the store, which meant that every once in a while I got to take a break from teaching adults how to use, say, Garage Band or Keynote and teach kids how. The classes were totally different. Adults wanted -- and expected -- to be guided step-by-step through every nuance and feature. When they couldn't immediately grasp a concept, "bad user interface" or "unintuitive design" were often blamed. And while I celebrate the questioning of the status quo, I couldn't help but notice that "unintuitive design" never came up when teaching kids. Whether they were 7 or 17, I could show them the entire process of building a song, a movie, or a presentation, and then set them loose, asking them to just raise their hands if they needed help. They didn't know how to use the software any better than adults did, but they believed they could figure it out. And then they did. This kind of faith and curiousity can serve us all, not just when it comes to technology, but when it comes to any new task we set out to master. As I've said before, sometimes in order to figure out how to do it, you just have to do it.

A Seat at the Table: A True Allegory

Every Tuesday night for nearly a year, a small group of friends and I had played bar trivia at one of West Hollywood’s oldest, smelliest bars. On an average night, the skimpily-clad waitresses at this dank, storied hell-hole might serve paleo salads to a cross-fit class afterparty in the back, pitchers of Coors to a shaggy-looking couple shooting pool, and burgers to incognito celebrities sitting at the bar. In our year of weekly patronage to the place, my groups’ celebrity sightings have included Robert Pattinson, Chris Rock, and a One Directioner. The blonde one. On the extremely popular trivia nights, you can add to that unfathomable sea of humanity a smattering of birthday girls, socially awkward old men, nerds and wannabe-nerds of all stripes.

As if all this weren’t eclectic enough, it’s also a sports bar. Televisions hang from every corner of the bar’s highly-cornered interior, broadcasting a mix of whatever is showing on ESPN and ESPN 2-10. This cornucopia of sports-package programming draws even more people to the already-crowded bar during any kind of playoff season, and should one of these games fall Tuesday Trivia night, finding a seat becomes a full-contact sport of its own. 

Never in a year of Tuesdays was the Table Dash more challenging than during the 2015 NBA finals. The Clippers were out of it, and the Lakers were nowhere near it. But Golden State, California’s last hope, were set to win it all if they could only take down LeBron James and his supporting cast. On the night of game three, trying to snag seats for eight, we arrived early for trivia to find the place as crowded as we’d ever seen it. It was the fourth quarter; we’d have to wait out the game, at which point tables would clear as the clientele shifted from jock to nerd. Some of us stood outside with the smokers while a few of us floated awkwardly in the narrow passage between the front door and the seating area. After several minutes of dodging harried waitresses and drunk Warriors fans, I shifted to a spot in front of a young couple’s booth in an attempt to get out of the way.

The couple was seated side by side on one part of the booth – whether for intimacy or a better view of the TV, it wasn’t clear. Very aware that I was standing conspicuously in front of them, I asked if I was blocking their view of the game. When they said no and asked if I wanted to sit down in the empty half of their booth, I decided to go for it. They seemed nice enough, and it would allow me to stop worrying about finding a table, as the group across the aisle was about to leave too, meaning my friends could swoop in, no problem.

Over the next 15 minutes, I surprised myself with my own energetic friendliness. I learned that my new tablemates were visiting from New Jersey; like me, they were rooting for Golden State out of ill will for LeBron; and the woman of the pair was a hairdresser whose lavender hair had just been dyed that shade earlier that day. The highlight of our brief encounter came when I told them that I was trying to make it as a screenwriter. The purple-haired woman looked at me earnestly and said, “You're going to make it. I truly believe that you get back the energy you put out into the world, and you have such a positive energy.” As if that ego boost weren’t reward enough for my stranger gamble, after the couple left and my friends sat down, I was congratulated for my dedication to table getting and my prowess at friend-making. Trivia night began with me feeling like a real champion in this little game called life.

It was one week later, on the heels of this social success story, that I met Joe. It was the night of game six of the NBA finals, and we came to the bar ready to do battle in the seating wars that we were sure to find there. The first wave of our group made a miscalculation, snagging a four-top that had no nearby seating prospects for the rest of us. The game ended – Golden State won the championship – and the sportsfans began to pay their tabs and finish their beers. I was on the lookout for someone leaving, and my eyes landed on Joe. To be honest, he was hard to miss. He was a hefty, middle-aged, white guy, red-faced and seated by himself at a booth, an empty beer glass and a giant pizza box on the table before him. The people at the table across from him had just left, and he'd been sitting there looking like he’d been ready to leave for the past 10 minutes. My friend Nick slid into the newly empty booth, but it wasn’t big enough for our whole group. Dammit, I wanted this dude’s neighboring table.

So I went in, leaned over to this puffy man and, as politely as possible, asked, “Are you leaving soon, or are you staying for trivia?" He turned to me slowly, uncomprehending. But hey, it was loud in there. So I asked again: are you leaving? He said that he was, but made no move to depart. When he added, speech slurred, that I should sit down, I hesitated. But then I thought of the week before. I thought about what a wonderful, friendly, warm hearted person I am, that kind of person who gives strangers – even dazed, bloated strangers – the benefit of the doubt. So I sat, just perching on the booth’s edge. 

My left butt cheek had barely touched down onto the vinyl when Joe jerked his head across the aisle to my friend Nick, who stared ahead at the front door, completely unaware of Joe. The din of the crowded bar made it difficult to hear anyone more than a couple feet away. "Is that your boyfriend?” he slurred. He must have seen us talking before.

Already second guessing my benevolence toward odd strangers, I lied. ”Yes, yes he is,” I replied, trying to sound like it was obvious. 

"You guys having good sex?" Joe, the total stranger, then asked.

I should have walked away. Instead, I forced a pivot. “Were you rooting for Golden State?” Very clever. 

“No," Joe pouted. I nodded, disappointed that my attempt to change the subject had run aground. But hey, I thought, maybe he’d get up and leave now.

Joe did not get up and leave. He stared at me with a sloshed blankness. "How is the pizza here?" I shouted, pointing to the giant box before him. The to go box. TO. GO. 

He shrugged his shoulders. It's pizza. He offered me a piece, but I declined. He patted his ample stomach, adding, “You can probably tell I've had a lot of pizzas.”

What is the appropriate response when a fat, drunk stranger asks if you can tell that he's fat? I pretended the question was about pizza. "Oh me too. I'm from Chicago. We have all kinds of pizza."

"You're from Chicago? I'm from Chicago!" Of course, I thought of course this doughy drunk guy in a striped polo shirt is from Chicago. "What high school did you go to?”

When I explained that I went to high school in Northwest Indiana, he told me his four kids went to Culver, which is a kind of fancy prep-school in the area. I knew a girl who left my seventh grade public school class to attend Culver, so I told him I was familiar with it. “Culver’s the fuckin’ best school,” he asserted.

I was relieved to find that this pervy loner guy was perhaps not such a pervy loner after all. Here he was, an out of town visitor, an Midwesterner, a proud father of four. I learned that he was also a businessman who financed films. When I told him I was a screenwriter, he handed me his business card and said that I should email him. And sure, he phrased it by slurring ”If you don't e-mail me in the next twenty four hours, you're dead to me," but still, this encounter was starting to seem like a real networking win for me. He took at piece of pizza out of the box and handed it to me, and this time, however reluctantly, I took it.

Across the way, our friend Russ arrived and started talking to Nick. I ate my slice of pizza slowly, refusing multiple times when Joe tried to offer me another. Instead of getting up, he ate another slice, so now we were both sitting in the booth eating his leftovers straight out of the to-go box. I propped my chin up on my hand and watched Steph Curry thank God and his teammates on the nearest corner television, out of things to say to Joe and hoping he would decide to head home already to sleep it off. 

"How do you do that?” he asked me.

“What?” I replied, genuinely confused.

“Sit so still like that. And make that face. Like a model.” Oh shit. Had he just gotten drunker?

“I'm just watching TV." I forced a polite smile and, instead of turning back to the screen, began trying to will him to boredom telepathically. 

Joe took a deep breath, "I'm just going to throw this out there…" he began.

I was suddenly struck by that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when bracing for terrible news, like the death of a loved one. What the hell was this man about to say to me?

“Is there an amount of money…that could be exchanged…and you’d go back to my hotel…and we'd…have sex?”

I wonder what face I made. I can guess, but my brain temporarily shut down for a moment, so now I can't be sure.

“Say, $500? $1000?” He was starting high, which was peculiarly flattering.

“I don't think so.”

‘2000? 3000? 5000?”

Look, I get that those are large sums of money, and I am poor. But I mean it when I say that there was no part of me that was even remotely entertaining the idea of having sex with this man, ever. Or, to be fair, with any man. I could consult the short list of celebrities I lust after — Dan Stevens in Downton Abbey. Theo James in…Downton Abbey. Possible Regency Fetish aside, if you offered me $50 to have sex with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, I’d tell you to keep the money so that I could actually enjoy myself. Some women might get off on being paid for their services; many more find the act fundamentally transactional, and thus might as well get paid for it. I am neither one of those types.

“6000?” I just kept shaking my head. I sneaked a look over to the first group of my friends, seated in the corner on the left. Not one eye was on me. I turn to the guys across the aisle to my right, shouting silently "Are you getting any of this?" But the bar was beyond noisy, and they weren’t even glancing in my direction. Clearly (or so it seemed to me in the moment) I’d created a monster out of my own independent friendliness. These dudes were SO not worried about me and my ability to look out for myself. I loved and hated them for it.

“7000? Seriously? Still no? Why?”

“I think you’ve got the wrong girl.”

Joe stopped at $50,000, finally getting the message through his loaded skull. I think we both knew that there was never a chance that he’d actually pay me $50,000 for sex; it was more that he needed to know that there was a price at which he could buy anything he wanted. When I still did not assent, Joe took a dejected, momentary timeout before telling me that the whole thing had been a kind of thought experiment. A joke, really. ”She said she do it for $1000” he said, pointing to a passing waitress who had not stopped, or even glanced, at the table since I'd been there. “I'm happily married to a wonderful woman. I've got four kids.”

“I remember. They go to Culver.” Drunk as he was, this response still seem to make him nervous. I pretended to believe that his indecent proposal has been a joke from the beginning. I laughed and nodded, feeling like I had passed some kind of cosmic test and desperately trying not to picture this man's tiny penis. Then the people at the table behind Joe got up and left. I could move to that table and be a bit closer to one faction of my group, or, if my friends moved to it, they could be closer to me. It was after 9pm by now — trivia set to start any minute — and I had a decision to make: should I continue to sit across from this man who had now proven himself to be every bit the pervy loner I had once feared him to be, or should I abandon my post, thus rendering the entire ordeal a complete waste?

“So there’s really no chance we’re going to have sex?” Joe then asked, as if trying to help me with my decision.

"Sorry," I said, standing up."Thanks for the pizza." I still had the stale crust in my hand.

“You're leaving?”

“I am trying to play trivia with my friends, and we want to sit together,” I explained. A hurt look crossed his face, as if he was just now learning that I’d been waiting for him to leave ever since I first asked him if he was leaving soon. 

“Can I at least have a kiss?“

“Sorry,” I sighed, exasperated. What had I done to deserve this?

“Fuck you then,” was Joe’s charming rejoinder.

I threw my purse into the adjacent booth. "Watch my bag,” I hissed to Russ and Nick. 

“Everything ok?” Russ asked me, suddenly aware that I was looking flustered. I just shook my head and rushed off to the bathroom, wanting to be as far away from this stranger as possible. Once in the bathroom, I suddenly felt very dirty. I hurled the tasteless pizza crust into the trash with violent disgust. Why had I even taken it? I didn’t want it. Why had I even sat down? I was just trying to be nice.

When I returned to our new table, Joe was still sitting there in front of his pizza box. He left a few minutes later. He probably wouldn't remember any of this in the morning. But I would.

I debriefed my friends on the encounter. Reactions were divided sharply along gender lines. The boys were over the moon about the unreality of it all. One of them asked me why I didn't take Joe up on his offer, laughing when I answered that it would have meant missing trivia; another said that once he saw I had scored a piece of pizza, he figured I must've been doing pretty well for myself.  The girls, however, bought me a milkshake and gave me hugs, telling me how sorry they were that they hadn't noticed I was in trouble. And you know, both sides were right. Being asked to join the worlds oldest profession, if only for a couple of minutes, had been both horrible and hilarious. I was both traumatized and kind of flattered. I mean…$50,000?

We came in second at trivia that night. I was tasked with saving the gift card we'd won, and I stashed it in a purse pocket, right next to the business card Joe had given me. When I pulled both cards out the following week, I noticed Joe's card was double-sided. An investor service was listed on one side, a commercial real estate firm on the other. Under his name, on both sides, were the letters “CEO.”

* * * * *

Is there a moral to this story? I don’t fucking know. I don't want it to be "don't talk to strangers." For one thing, that puts the onus on me. Is it my fault a Midwesterner got drunk alone with his pizza and tried to pay me for sex? Had I been “asking for it” by my mere willingness to sit down at his table? The sweet couple from the week before hadn't tried to sleep with me, and they were from New Jersey!

So let the moral be this: Don’t get drunk alone in public if you’re a total asshat. Don’t try to pay people for sex unless they bring it up first. And when in Los Angeles, be prepared to put up with some weird shit in the name of finding a goddamn seat at the table.

 

Have You Heard About This "Platinum Rule?"

This past Monday, on a whim, I checked out the audiobook of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant.

It was a dangerous whim. The book, which had been on my radar since I'd heard the authors interviewed on On Being, a podcast I've mentioned before here. I knew what the book was about: coping with grief. I wasn' t quite prepared for the buttons it would press for me, the way it would subtly entice me to revisit depths of grief I haven't visited in a while. I could go on (and might, in a future post) about the weird sore-spot prodding regimen I seem to have set up for myself this October, but as I'm currently only on disc 2 of 5, let's keep this simple: Have you heard of the Platinum Rule?

Because I heard about it yesterday. Twice.

The first time was, of course, in the aforementioned audiobook. I was just a few blocks into my commute home from Beverly Hills when I heard the book tell me that perhaps rather than following the Golden Rule -- Treat others as you would want to be treated -- we could aspire beyond that to a "Platinum Rule": Treat others as they would want to be treated. In this context, the Platinum Rule was a reminder that true caring for another person (perhaps a person in pain) should mean not assuming that what they want or need is what you'd want or need in the same situation. Instead, we should tune into them, or (radical notion!) actually ASK them earnestly about what would best suit their needs.

It's a tall order, but one worth at least keeping in mind. Opening oneself to the mere idea of the Platinum Rule means remembering that we can go beyond just assuming everyone's needs and reactions are the same as our own. And that could shift our behavior in ways that leads to deeper relationships and more fulfilling lives for us and for those around us.

Have you ever learned a new word only to suddenly hear it everywhere? I've had this experience, but usually it takes a day or two for the phrase to start popping up. "The Platinum Rule," however, took under an hour to reappear. In fact, I was still in the car, still commuting home from Beverly Hills (this is, in part, a testament to the length of time it takes to drive eight miles in LA during rush hour). I was listening to the latest episode of Note to Self, a show which has been looming large in my life this week, having been the inspiration of both a sermon and a dinner talk by the new Episcopal Bishop Coadjutor of LA, John Tayor, both of which I happened to be in attendance for, but that's another story. The topic of the show was not Option B or anything like it; they were discussing the way modern technology habits often drive us to neglect people we care about, rather than get closer to them. It's a compelling episode (and great sermon fodder, I might add).

About halfway through the short episode, host Manoush Zomorodi says to her guest, psychologist Esther Perel, that she's been thinking more about "The Platinum Rule." I made a face when I heard the words. "What the hell?" the face said. The context couldn't be more different. They weren't talking about dealing with friends who were coping with tragedy, they were talking about calling your friend back or answering a text. (Later in the episode, however, they did talk about calling a friend coping with tragedy.) 

The implication is clear enough: whether we're talking everyday interactions or life-changing upheaval, if we're communicating with others, consider following the Platinum Rule . I think the fact that this idea is in the air, and catching, is a sign that it might just be a good one.

 

The Blackest Sort of Deja Vu

I wrote and originally posted the below on December 14, 2012, after reading the news of the Sandy Hook massacre. It's nearly five years later, and damn it, what's different? Well, I no longer get my news from Facebook. And that feels like about it.

I suppose *I* am different. I am more civically engaged. I volunteer a lot more, partly because it's the only thing I have found that combats the feeling of powerlessness to heal a world that is trying so hard to change and yet, at every turn, seems to be its own worst enemy.  I engage with my local government. I am not sure what more I can do. And that feeling of powerlessness? It's still there, and it still sucks.

The vagueness of the below post is upsettingly prescient  I titled it, "Some Thoughts on All This Horrible Stuff That Happened Today That I Just Had to Write Down But It Was Too Long For Facebook."

How many more times will I feel compelled to repost this article? Please, Lord, let it be none.

**********************

Dec 14, 2012

A couple thoughts:

When I was in high school, I got to take a trip to Germany. During my trip, my peers and I spent some time at a German high school, and one day, toward the end of our trip, we went to a few different classes and answered questions about America. A boy's hand shot up: "Is it true," the boy asked, "that everyone in America has a gun?" We told him no, lots of people don't have guns.

"But you can get one when you are 18? And it's very easy."

We didn't really know. I remember we asked among ourselves, "Do you have to be 18? Yeah, I think it's pretty easy..." We were 16-year-old suburbanites. This was post-Columbine. We probably should have known. But, even in our ignorance, the significance of the question, and the fact that it was, for at least one kid, a defining trait of Americanness, was not lost on us. Some of the kids in the class were surprised by our answer as to the ease and prevalence of firearms in our country; some were probably scared, some excited. But they all, every one of those teenagers, thought it was weird.

But back to today. It is so strange to me that I've become one of those people who gets her news reports from Facebook. Blame grad school and not having a TV, I guess. Stranger still is that, even with only FB as a news-getting tool, I don't miss a whole lot. Especially when something really great happens. Or something really, really bad.

We are a reactionary people. Maybe it's because our country is so large and diverse, but in order for change to take place, it seems like we need hard proof that things are broken. I wish, for the sake of families that lost loved ones today, that we could be more proactive.

At the same time, it would be nice if we could hold off on politicizing every tragedy our nation faces, out of a moment of respect for the grieving. But we can't help it. When something terrible happens, we want to fix it. One way to fix a problem is through legislation. Another is through education. Some Americans prefer the government to stay out of their business, and that makes sense. But when a problem becomes a plague, an epidemic, and talking about it or putting band aids on it isn't working, I think it's time for legislation to step in.

I know this is vague, but this is not a news story. And I think this logic applies pretty well to lots of things in our country: gun control laws, sure, but also mental health care, the impossibility of a one-income household which keeps many parents away from their kids, sloppy national discourse, 21st century isolation-based anxiety, 24-hour news cycles and fear mongering, the list goes on... But another thing about this big, busy, diverse country: we have strength to make an impact, but we lose momentum fast. That goes for me and blog-post writing too. So, I don't know what we're supposed to do now - start a petition? Sign a petition? Call our congressmen? - but I know we need to do it. Soon.