by Thomas M. Pender
I’ve been exposed to many a personality in my years: angels, clowns, jerks, sphincters . . . the list goes on and on. It is, however, a rare and puzzling thing when I encounter a human being who is completely devoid of any sort of character traits. Someone who is more a piece of furniture, or perhaps an alien who just hatched from his pod, than he is human being.
Recently out of college, I got a job in the mailroom of a Troy, Michigan insurance company at the dawn of the 1990s. A great portion of my day was spent running interoffice mail from office to office, but in the mornings, I would bring bins of mail from the post office to be sorted and distributed by myself and my allies. One running joke among us lackeys was the question we received practically each and every time we would deliver a bigger-than-an-envelope package to a desk. As if rehearsed, the recipient of such a package would sit back a bit, startled as though a snake had slithered out from behind their stapler, and ask, “What’s this?”
My sarcasm-laden brain would consistently respond with such inaudible gems as “I didn’t think I was allowed to use my x-ray vision on the job” and “Well, when I illegally opened it in the mailroom, it looked like Chinese porn.” Alas, I was left to simply shrug and leave or simply roll my eyes (also internally) and leave. They were apparently never going to understand the foolishness of their question.
Craig was a vice president of the company, and a peculiarly dry piece of human toast. Normally, I didn’t attempt to pass the time with or amuse Craig, even though he seemed to be only a few years older than me. I tend to gauge individuals, regardless of rank, in terms of openness, friendliness, and sense of humor. I have been known to tease company presidents (and, in fact, had done so at this company). When circumstances allow, and a janitor or a chairman of the board is willing to trade ribbings, I’m right there with them.
Not Craig so much. Over my many months of working at the firm, I had seen him smile and even chuckle, but it was always with one or both of the other two men in his department, or with a client, or with the president. He never laughed, though. He apparently only allowed himself to chuckle at low decibels, and only for two seconds max.
Then one day, I was in a particularly cheery mood when I put a package of respectable size on Craig’s desk. I was fully prepared for his reaction when he sat back a smidge and asked, “What’s this?”
“Some cereal,” I answered. “Supposed to be good for ya.”
Now, folks born in the mid-‘80s or later may not get this response, but if you were alive and had a television in your house in the late ‘70s, you knew this line. It was from an incredibly overused commercial for Life Cereal, featuring three freckly brothers. It opens with the two older brothers discussing this new product their mother has forced on them at breakfast. The middle brother asks the oldest “What’s this stuff?” and the oldest replies with the exact wording and tone I had used in response to “What’s this?” After a few lines, they shove the product in front of youngest brother Mikey, who then proceeds to devour it.
I would have understood if such a reference was not exactly hilarious to our boy Craig. Perhaps an upward jerk of his moustache would have been enough to prove I had brought some modicum of human humor to his otherwise automaton day. Honest to God, the man blinked at me like I was speaking in Mandarin Chinese. He had no conception – or at least, he did not allow himself to reveal that he had any conception – of something as lowly as a television commercial.
I left the office a bit stunned. I was ready to tip the scale far into the “alien” category for the conundrum which was Craig, but first I had to check something out. I scooted back to the mailroom, where my two co-workers were co-working, and said, “Okay, please tell me this makes sense to you,” and relayed what had been said upstairs in Craig’s domain. Both judges laughed in earnest when I got to the punch line, so I could therefore conclude that it did, in fact, make sense. If these two gentlemen, who were three to five years younger than I, could understand the response, surely an elder of a few years could.
Unless, of course, he had been born in another part of the galaxy. . . .
