Some Nothing That Happened
The right way to be wrong and how to fail upward (with sympathy).
Thanks for reading Big Reader Bad Grades! The newsletter got a few paid subscribers this week (thank you!) and, for a hot minute on Monday, it was #91 Rising in Culture. That felt good.
I appeared today in
’s debut interview series for Substack. We talked about the platform, Miami, and my new book CUBAFRUIT. He’s a smart, dutiful, passionate reader and writer. His newsletter’s well worth a follow. Last week I was on ’s podcast Hu U No to talk about my profiles of William T. Vollmann and Mark Z. Danielewski.Been feeling like a writer lately and I’m grateful you’re popping in.
1.
’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in The Believer never stopped running.I thought it had.
Somebody posted a link to the latest installment and I read the whole thing with my mouth open. It was great, though it seemed a little understated, breaking a decade-long silence as if it hadn’t happened.
Then I saw links to the past dozen or so articles and realized the silence I was thinking about was a silence that did not happen.
2.
It was a weird way to phrase the question but I asked ChatGPT, “Why did I think Nick Hornby had quit his Believer column?”
GPT told me this was a forgivable mistake. It told me I likely discovered the column through its paperback collections. (This is true.) The column stopped being collected into paperbacks and, for a long time, it was only available in The Guardian’s print edition.
Gave me like four bullet points in a consoling tone about why it makes a lot of sense for me to be wrong. That my wrongness might have been more rational than the reality.
This is the tone in which I’d like to be taught new things going forward: sympathetically.
3.
I want to tell you about one of my managers at the grocery store and I want to do it in that fashion.
His name is Raymond. He’s 30 years old.
Raymond was a staffer when I got hired three years ago. He told me on Day One that he was in the Manager Training Program.
It sounded lofty at the time but it’s not. The way you get into the manager training program is you tell a manager, “I can do your job,” but gently.
Your name goes on a list and then they haze you for six months. Something will go wrong and they’ll say something like, “Go get whats his face,” meaning you, the person who wants to be manager. Coming in on your day off because they really needed some last-minute help and then, as you’re heading out the door at 11 p.m., last non-managerial personnel in the story, they tell you with a sympathetic wince that the opener could reeeally use some help at 5 a.m.
But it’s a good company and so people do it.
4.
The best-suited candidate I’ve met for the manager track, loved by everyone on staff, was under consideration for nearly a year. He reached the end of it last month.
Corporate was reluctant to promote him to manager because he’s only 22. (At age 16 he was GM of the little kosher froyo place up the road.)
He went for a practice interview last month. He sat before a panel of three GMs from three other stores in the region. Their feedback to the regional manager was that, after nearly a year of training and hazing, he’s “not ready yet.”
So he gave notice.
Our GM took 48 hours to try talking him out of it and by then he was already a manager at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
With two weeks to go, he released all of his shifts except the last one, and for the next ten days he came back and back and back to the store and made use of his discount.
On the day of his final shift he stayed home.
My hope is he grows bored of Enterprise Rent-A-Car and decides to run for office.
5.
Raymond, though. He was in that training program longer than anyone.
He claims to’ve spent a year in medical school. When a customer has questions about the nutritional facts of an item he will mention these two semesters as a credential when really it sounds more like the lack of a credential. Like pointing with authority at the frame where a diploma could’ve been.
When discussing customers or merchandising he’ll cite the science of “consumer behavior.” Ask him a question and he’ll clarify he learned it while studying psychology. Ask a second question and he’ll clarify that he took a class.
He blinks more than anyone I know and his mouth is always open.
Before med school he was a theater kid. Passionate. He liked the zany stuff. Physical comedy. Had his sights on Hollywood but something happened and here he is.
Everyone who works at the grocery store has a “something” that “happened” and we talk around it the way inmates do their charges.
6.
Raymond is friendly but irritable. There are two witnesses who will tell you (with low tones and a haunted glaze) about the tantrum he threw in the break room one night when he thought somene had drank his Dr Pepper out of the fridge.
Turns out he just forgot that he’d put it in the freezer. The reason he put it there is because he’d forgotten, earlier, to put it in the fridge.
7.
If Raymond senses you’re avoiding him, because he’s offended you, he’ll come and make small talk. He sounds boyishly friendly and well-meaning. Clearly trying to make nice. Contrite without apologizing.
It sounds like a paranoid habit when he hear or read about it but if you’re actually there with your skin and your shoes you’ll see that he’s pretty spot-on; that he’s not assuming people are always mad at him so much as noticing.
He’s only 30 years old and he’s already harbored serious ambitions for Hollywood and suffered what was probably a shattering moment when it quit looking feasible. Then he went toward medicine and had some other shattering moment. Then he ended up here as the new guy and decided to pursue the manager track. Make a career of this place.
8.
Yesterday in the breakroom a colleague came and sat next to me with her eyes wide and phone clenched tight in both hands: “I found his Google reviews.”
Apparently Raymond referred her to his ophthalmologist. So she Googled the guy’s practice. There were a ton of 4- and 5-star ratings, but a single 1-star rating. The rating was accompanied by a review. The review was three times longer than anyone else’s review. It was broken up in interesting ways with timestamps. The reviewer had updated it three times.
The review began like this:
“I have been waiting in this lobby for an hour and fifteen minutes…”
When she clicked on the username she showed me a scroll of 1-star reviews for local businesses.
Then she did some thumb stuff on the screen real quick, swiping and typing, “And guess where that restaurant is,” the one he’d just given a one-star review, “guess what’s next to it.”
She pulled up the map and show me.
But look: this is Miami Beach, a tourist destination; I haven’t Googled it myself, and I don’t intend to, but my theory — in the spirit of GPT sympathy — is there are probably several Enterprise Rent-A-Cars in this area.
I love this one! It’s very Hornby-esque
I reread this twice and I still don't know how the ending makes me feel. I love that.