Often the answers to such questions are already inside of us.
OTHER ME: Isn’t that a line from The Matrix? Could you please just answer my question?
ME: Which question?
OTHER ME: Should I go back to training or not?
ME: In your tenth position, you have the Chariot, inverted: defeat, stagnation. If you stay on your current path, you have that to look forward to.
OTHER ME: But that’s just it: I don’t know what my current path is. I’m in the parking lot of some rest area in Virginia at three in the morning. Does that mean that the path I’m on now is to a beach in Florida, or am I actually just here for the night and I’m actually headed back to work tomorrow? I don’t know. It’s like I’m in the middle of this big forest with all these trees and no path whatsoever. I don’t even know which direction I’m supposed to go to find a path, or which direction I want to go, or which direction I can go. It’s like The Blair Witch Project inside my head, except without the witch and the shaky camera and that super annoying chick who should’ve died before the movie even started.
ME: The Six of Swords here in your fifth posit—
OTHER ME: God, you’re annoying. How do you get people to stay on the phone with you so long?
ME: That’s a very good question. What I try to do first is empathize with the caller. Let them know I understand what they’re feeling. For example, you feel like somebody else is always in charge of everything you do: Go to school. Get out of our school. Do what we tell you to do when we tell you to do it. Say what we tell you to say when we tell you to say it. You don’t feel like a real person, but more like a puppet on a string or a video game character that somebody else is always controlling. When you were little, you used to picture what your life would be like when you were twenty-two. This isn’t what you’d imagined. Sometimes you wish the earth was flat so you could just drive off the end and float into peaceful nothingness. Sound about right?
OTHER ME: Yeah, I guess.
ME: I can also keep people on the phone by going off on a lot of tangents. Make them think we’re just having a normal conversation. Time goes a lot faster that way. Open-ended questions help a lot, too. Half the time, they already know the answer to whatever question they have; they just need to hear it out loud. The main thing, though, is to never let the conversation stop. Always keep it moving, moving, moving, and you too can be an excellent telephone psychic.
OTHER ME: If you’re so great why are you on probation at work?
ME: Let’s not talk about me. We’re here to help you.
OTHER ME: Which you still haven’t done, by the way.
ME: What is it you really want?
OTHER ME: I want to be like Matt—remember? freshman year? Used the last of his money to buy a plane ticket to California without knowing a single solitary person in the whole entire state, met those Bud Light or Miller Lite models on the plane, they hooked him up with a landscaping job for, like, twenty-five bucks an hour, and now he’s got it made. I wish I had the balls to do that.
ME: Yeah, you are a wimp. I don’t need to be psychic to see that. Maybe you can start small. What can you do besides flying to California and hoping for a job?
OTHER ME: I don’t know.
ME: What would you like to do right now?
OTHER ME: I’d kind of like to get out of here before that weird guy at the picnic table comes over here and does something.
ME: What’s he going to do?
OTHER ME: I don’t know. Something crazy. Can we just leave?
ME: I guess. Where are we going?
OTHER ME: That’s what you’re supposed to tell me. Where should we go?
ME: How the hell should I know?
June 7
I can’t get these two monster truck announcers out of my head:
“Forget everything you thought you hated about PowerPoint.”
Forget it all.
“ATS training will make you hate PowerPoint like never before.”
Like never before.
“Phrases flying in.”
One painful word at a time.
“Lame sound effects!”
Whoosh!
“We’ve got that and more!”
So much more!
“Graphs and charts!”
Red and blue!
“Venn diagrams!”
Shaded!
“More clip art than you ever knew existed!”
The only smiley face you’ll see will be on the screen!
“But we don’t stop there!”
We make it suck even more!
“Trainer Tim reads everything on the screen word for word!”
Word for word!
“If he misses one, he goes back and rereads the whole line!”
The whole entire line!
“Company policies!”
Boring.
“Telephone etiquette!”
Common sense.
“Rules and regulations!”
Stupid.
“Monday, Monday, Monday!”
That’s right! Three straight Mondays!
“Thru Friday, Friday, Friday!”
Eight hours a day!
“With a half hour for lunch!”
And two fifteen-minute breaks!
“Appalachian—”
whoosh
“TeleServices—”
whoosh
“Telephone—”
whoosh
“Sales—”
