New Guy Bites the Lemon
In which the new guy turns out to have a problem, gets labeled one himself.
Thanks for reading! I’m reporting an ongoing weekly series about Robert Caro’s 50-year-in-the-making biography of Lyndon Johnson. Part One ran on Thursday, Part Two comes later this week. The series is running mostly behind a paywall, so consider upgrading to a paid subscription ($5 a month) if you’re interested!
The Fifth of Three
This is the first in a series of posts about Robert A. Caro’s fifty-year biography of Lyndon Johnson: how it started, how it endured, and the changing literary ecosystem in which, once ever decade, a new volume landed.
1.
Our new hire at the grocery store appears to have a learning disability. He is egoless and polite. To say that he’s “innocent” feels condescending but the word comes to mind a lot because he’s making everyone furious at the fact that he doesn’t do anything. Just starts a task and then wanders off. In the break room, eating lunch, people trade lockjawed whispers about how he comes back here every ten or fifteen minutes, opens his locker, lifts his shirt to just above his nipples and applies deodorant, then spritzes himself with cologne, then opens the fridge and scans the shelves. There’s a can of whipped cream with STAFF scrawled across the label in Sharpie. He tips his head back and shoots a jet into his mouth from two or three inches high and then puts it back and returns to work except that “work” in this case means walking laps around the store saying “Hi How Are You” to everybody and improvising tasks that he does not complete.
It seems like he is knowingly doing nothing, like he’s well-practiced at performing busyness without getting anything done; and yet if you put it in those terms (“practiced,” “performing”) it sounds insidious.
Like he’s trying to get away with something.
2.
I suspect the reality is this: his whole life is about getting away with something. I think he has spent a life hitting the walls of his own understanding when it comes to complex tasks, social signals, things like that; as a remedy I think he has learned how to fib his way through social and professional situations by a few simple tenets like (1) be polite, (2) stay moving…
You can only get away with it for so long, though. It’s like when someone’s hearing starts to fade and they’re too proud to be a drag on the conversation by saying “what?” and “huh?” and “speak up?” and so eventually they just smile and nod, as a way of both protecting their ego and keeping things moving along for everyone else.
It’s functional and everyone gets along.
Where the blowback comes is when, as a colleague or loved one, you confide to them the intimate details of your long and challenging day, to which they give a slight smile, sympathetic, and nod, until finally you become sick of your own voice, or overwhelmed by the subject, and so you ask them how their day went, and in response to this question they give a slight smile, sympathetic, and nod.
3.
One of our regulars has an autistic teenage son who discreetly bites apples and sets them back on the pile, bite-mark-down, smiling as he chews it, shivering with excitement, mincing back to his dad’s side like he got a way with something devious except he’s also done this with lemons and eggplant, presumably not anticipating or remembering the differences in taste and texture, and found them unpalatable such that we find these little mush-mounds of produce stuck to the displays.
Everyone has seen this. Cleaned up after him.
He is beloved.
4.
Yet this new hire makes everyone furious because he complicates our final hour, when we have to set the store up for the morning crew, which is a very exacting, unforgiving, basically unhappy group of people. Hard to please. They have to unload several thousand pounds of product in pre-dawn hours and haul it around the store. Sometimes they’ll open one of the banana boxes and there’s a fleshy bearded spider strolling leggy-coquettish over the waxpaper, crinkle noises haunting you for hours, winking three eyes at once like “Hey there...”
This last hour of the shift, prepping for the needs of a complaint-prone morning staff, is now more frenzied than usual because we’re working, as an under-staffed team, against the cumulative effect of one team member doing almost nothing for eight hours.
And there he is. Smiling like nothing’s wrong. Chewing something.
5.
One time in the break room a colleague mentioned on payday that he’d run out of money two days prior, but he had no food at his apartment, and so he called out from work yesterday and just drank NyQuil in the morning and then another dose in the afternoon so that he could sleep through the hunger until finally his phone chimed with an email saying a direct deposit had just gone through, $800 or whatever, whereupon he sat right up and ordered two full meals from the 24-hour McDonald’s on 16th and Alton, 3 a.m. or thereabouts. He was laughing as he told the story and so were the handful of people standing around the break room eating lunch and fixing coffee. I wanted to say something like, “It’s bad we live like this,” but everyone already jokes about me being a buzzkill, Mister Oh Hey D’ja Hear the Bad News?, so I left it.
Yes it’s a fact that we’re broke but you’d be rude to point it out.
6.
But similar disabilities or impairments are probably rampant through the staff. I’ve got an “impairment” thing myself. Learned about it after a long IQ-type test in a South Miami office when I was fourteen. They told me I was really good at language but very severely not good with math. I said OK fine. I knew that already. But then when I stood up to leave the guy’s office he stood halfway up himself and asked in earnest if I might need help with the door.
I’m pretty confident I wouldn’t get judged for that if I told people. Indeed there’s hardly anything I can think of a colleague getting judged for except pervy stuff. There’s one staffer who hallucinates during the shift and weeps at what she sees and there’s another afflicted by something called “pica,” i.e. the compulsive eating of non-edible things, which in her case means pea-sized wedges of cardboard and clay, they drop from her hoodie like breadcrumbs. Another colleague wears a heavy gold medallion under his shirt and the medallion is shaped like the Sasquatch of whose thriving communal existence he is vehemently convinced. One colleague is a Venezuelan photographer with Harry Potter eyeglasses and a nicotine stripe on his mustache who got in trouble for habitually flicking his tongue at one young colleague and offering another his whole day’s wages for dick pics (that’s Ernesto and he does actually get judged for his behavior).
Several colleagues have readily-available mugshots online in relation to charges including DUI and domestic violence and stalking and kidnapping and inciting a riot but the one time a colleague came to work and started spouting about the convicted stalker among us it was they who got taken out back, and sat down on a milk crate, and told a thing or two about courtesy.
Like yes we’re all broken, biting at the apple, but you are rude to point it out.
I have ADHD. I also hate being micromanaged. So when I start a new job, there's a dilemma: should I tell my boss I need to be managed closely (which I dislike, but is more conducive to getting my stuff done consistently on time)? Or do I manage it myself, which means less consistent deadline accuracy but a more enjoyable working environment for me?
I should clarify that it's not so bad that I'm at risk of being fired. But it's a fact that I know something that would make me more productive, but that I'm withholding because it would make me less happy.
Then there's the secondary choices that come from this tendency. Do I make up an excuse or reason why something is taking longer? Am I just honest that I've been unable to focus on it? There's a spectrum of behaviors that I can choose to employ or not employ, most of which improve my work at the expense of my happiness. Some I "have" to employ to perform at a job-adequate level (things like being strict with writing things in my calendar); others aren't as clear cut.
Point being that there's a malicious end of the spectrum, where I'm using excuses and blaming others as a way of avoiding accountability for deadlines. But there's this whole mushy middle where I could be doing more, but I might not be "expected" to. That's where it sucks for coworkers: it's hard when a request is near the line of "this is something reasonable to ask my coworker" and "this puts an unfair burden on them."
You have written another prose poem. It's an unusual talent. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it