Hybrid Work for Side A: “[THE JOB]” by Randall Le

I – GET [THE JOB]

It’s been a while now but I sort of remember when the knowledge hit me. 

Man, you should probably be thinking about getting a job. 

Insane. Ridiculous to think that anyone could make it through college without having to think about that. 

“Do what interests you.”

Just another victim of the Big Millenial Lie. 

It was the last week of June 2014 and I was the fresh recipient of a Bachelor of the Arts in a field that online posters of a certain infamous message board referred to as “s**t tier.” 

Most days I sat on the couch in my cockroach infested apartment with my struggling HP laptop, browsing job postings. It was just me, late 2000s B movies (and Enemy of the State, starring Will Smith), two more months of rent, and the void. 

Love the void. 

The void of online is infinite, each submitted job application slowly turning end over end like a satellite tumbling through space, never to be seen again unless hesitantly probed by the alien fingers of some H.R. manager in Alpha Centauri, containing a gold record that when played reveals:

Randall. B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from [REGIONAL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE]. Prior Work Experience: begging alumni to donate money for $5 Amazon giftcard incentives. Grader at Kumon.

It had been a couple weeks of only leaving my house to go one block to the grocery store. Capitalist respectability politics demands that you not experience any type of enjoyment, only a vague sense of impending doom when unemployed. Then I saw the ad:

Funeral homes? Does that mean no sales? A week earlier I had slogged through some online training for a large health insurance company’s call center until, despite their best attempts to conceal the truth, I realized the entire job was cold call sales.

People like, want to call funeral homes. Funeral homes offer a needed service. There can’t be sales. What would you even try to sell—“I’m so sorry to hear that, has anyone else in your family passed away recently?”

How bad could it be? [page filled with phrase “how bad could it be” going different directions fading the closer they get to the bottom]

II – GOT [THE JOB]

TWO WEEKS LATER. Pittsburgh in the July heat—I’m sitting on the curb talking to this guy Ed from Cleveland. As we wait for the Megabus back to the Midwest, I try not to laugh as his face and the wall behind him bend and shift slightly.

We start talking about how the Cleveland Clinic wants to build a new light rail line into the city.

“They don’t tell you that they’re only going to build it in the nice neighborhoods. They only want it to help their employees get to work,” Ed says. 

I respond by telling him I don’t understand all the crackpot conspiracy theories going around these days. Big business and moneyed interests are already operating right before our eyes, that’s the real conspiracy. Ed agrees, then leans in.

“Well y’know—y’know the greatest trick that’s ever been pulled? Convincing people you don’t exist. It’s the devil. The Illuminati, six six six,” Ed says. 

I stifle another laugh as shafts of nonexistent light dance around my peripheral vision. 

All right Ed. 

Ed changes the subject to how one time he tried to buy a hotdog for a homeless woman but she didn’t want it because it had pork, and she’s a Muslim, and well he just thinks … 

You get the idea. 

The conversation just went downhill from there. The bus finally pulls up and I purposefully move away from him and sit in front of this guy on his way to Detroit. We make some small talk then settle in for the last five hours of the ride as the bus drives head-on towards the sun.

I have one week to go home and visit family before I start the job.

III – START [THE JOB]

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say to a guy calling from Detroit when he references having recently lost wife. He was calling in to follow up on his bill from a recent funeral.

“You need to rethink that! You need to rethink that! You need to rethink that!” he yells. “You LOSE your keys. You LOSE your wallet. You don’t LOSE someone else.” 

Okay sure. 

“I apologize,” I say, “I’ll relay your message.” 

Damn, that sucked. 

Over time I would learn to simply say “I’m sorry to hear that” whenever tragedy was related to me, in varying sympathetic tones, and keep the conversation rolling. “Condolences” has a Christian connotation, I was told, and can be offensive to someone of a different faith. And as I had just learned, expressing sorrow for a loss could be misinterpreted as an invitation to engage in spirited ontological debate.

Being sorry though, that’s timeless. I’m the one that’s sorry, I’m not saying anything about you. It’s my sorrow and you can’t take it from me.

Starting out at [THE JOB], they pair you with a more experienced “call specialist.” At first, for a couple days, they talk while you type out the messages that get sent out to funeral directors. 

It’s like when you’re a kid and you only have one controller to split between you and your friend. So you try to play with one of you moving while the other aims and shoots—except with a sense of impending doom because you know what’s coming. You’re going to have to talk to people. 

After all, that’s what [THE JOB] is really about.

IV – MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

The line they feed you at [THE JOB] is this:

If you’re a funeral director, and a lot of them are small family operations y’know, you have a couple choices about how you want to do your phones. Choice one is you can try to do it yourself and get calls at all hours of the day and night. And what if you’re somewhere with bad service, or you’re at a funeral itself and have to silence your phone? Or if you’re in bed and don’t hear it ringing?

Remember that 2010 movie Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps? The one they put out after the financial crisis, the sequel to the one with Charlie Sheen that they put out after the previous big financial crisis in the late 80s? Me neither. Never watched it. Point being, money never sleeps for funeral directors either.

Choice two is you directly hire an employee or employees to answer your phones 24/7. But that can get expensive, and some days and nights are slower than others, especially if you operate in a smaller town.

Choice three is us. We do per-call pricing, so you only have to pay for the calls we take for you. You can forward us your line whenever you feel like it and take back over at any time. We triage all your calls for you and send you a text, call, e-mail, and/or push notification depending on your preferred criteria. 

Tired of being constantly bothered about headstones? We’ll take the message and you can check it at your convenience. Really want to know as soon as clergy contact you? We’ll reach out right away. Oh, and most importantly, we’ll make sure you never drop a death call.

V – DEATH CALLS

A “death call” is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s the first call that you, one of your loved ones, or a medical professional/law enforcement officer make to a funeral home after someone dies.

On the phone, maybe that means I get to hear your raw emotions after suffering the death of someone close to you. Maybe it means I hear a nurse calmly describing where the body is located and when it will be ready for pickup. 

A funeral director would hear that stuff too if they took your call personally, of course. But they also hear the faint ka-ching sound of a slot machine when it hits jackpot and starts spilling coins onto the floor in the background, because death calls are the real moneymakers for them.

The company line is that, because families tend to use the same funeral homes, when you lose someone’s business, you’re not just losing their business but their kids’ business, their kids’ business, their kids’ kids’ business, and so on and so forth. I think the line is that one missed business opportunity in reality is seven missed opportunities. Or something like that.

So you get fired for dropping death calls.

VI – ALTER EGO

I’ve been working at [THE JOB] for one month now. That means my name has been misspelled as “Randell” for one month in the company system. I don’t say anything to anyone and it will never be corrected. Eventually I’ll start joking to people that “Randell” is my new suave alter ego. It doesn’t really matter because my supervisor constantly calls me “Ronald” in front of a giant sign that has my misspelled name demarking my cubicle for the shift.

One day my supervisor tells me that I made a mistake—accidentally telling a caller there would be a visitation instead of a memorial service. This infuriated the funeral director. All of our calls are recorded so funeral directors can go back and listen if they want to get more information, or in this case, to seek vengeance.

Ten minutes later I realized that when my supervisor was telling me about my mistake she called me by the correct name and not “Ronald,” which I felt was “semi-depressing kind of a letdown” (exact contemporaneous notes of event). 

It will be the only time she calls me by the correct name before she dies a couple months later. We answer for the funeral home that handles her funeral arrangements so we ended up taking her death call too. Small world.

VII – THE TELEPHONE GAME

On Monday, August 11, 2014, Robin Williams hung himself. The next day, an office wide bulletin went out reminding us that we were not to give out any information or speculate as to where or when his funeral services were being handled. They didn’t explicitly say we were handling them, but why make that kind of statement unless you know something?

On Wednesday, August 13, 2014, my ex and one of my friends tried to convince me to get a new gig. I don’t remember exactly why, but I can guess. When I tell most people about [THE JOB] the primary response I get is something along the lines of “wow, that must be hard, talking to grieving families.” And it is, but mostly because of things other than that.  

I’ll set the scene. You have a bunch of people calling a funeral home who aren’t stupid (for the most part). People in America these days are pretty good at picking up on when they’re being call screened. 

They don’t like it. It feels impersonal. So when they figure out that you’re not an employee of the funeral home, they, very naturally, want to immediately hang up on you.

But get this: if someone hangs up on you, for whatever reason, and it’s later discovered it was a death call that went to another funeral home—you’re fired.

Because of this, every call, every “I’ll just call back later” jerkoff is a death call until it’s proven otherwise. It puts you on edge constantly. They drill you about seemingly “innocuous” calls where it turned out somebody died. In a way, it’s sort of fitting: every call could be your last.

At first the thought is kind of stressful—every hangup sends a cold shot of adrenaline rushing through my body. Eventually, I learned to just blurt “has someone just passed away?” in a sort of vaguely concerned newscaster deadpan right before getting hung up on. Can’t blame me if someone refuses to answer the question, no matter how inappropriate and unhinged it seems at that point in the conversation, am I right folks? 

VIII – GET TO [THE JOB]

In September of 2014 I moved from my shared bedroom into a windowless 8’ x 9’ closet in Chinatown. I would fill up two duffel bags and a backpack full of my shit, walk the two and a half blocks to the subway and take it to 11th Street, walk the five long blocks north to my new apartment, walk up two flights of stairs, drop all my stuff off, go back, and repeat for the rest of the week. In the end, my friend/new roommate Chris helped me bring the rest of my stuff over, but he had to make another trip and his girlfriend had his key, so we just dumped all my stuff on the sidewalk and I stood and waited by it for 15-30 minutes while he went and got it. I took a picture and posted it on Twitter captioned “everything I own on the sidewalk in philadelphia.” From that point on, weekdays at 5:45 a.m., and on Sundays at 5:30 a.m., I would get up, walk to the el, take it to 69th Street Station, transfer to the 101 towards Media (or the 109 bus on Sundays), and walk the rest of the way to the unassuming office building housing [THE JOB]. Eventually I got the timing down enough to always sleep until just before my stop.

As the summer months faded into winter, my mornings turned dark. On trash day, trudging the five blocks south towards Market Street through Chinatown, the air took on a sickly sweet smell—not quite rotten, but definitely fish related.

One Sunday, after swiping through the subway turnstile, I walked over to my normal waiting spot past some guy and his friend, the only two other people on the platform this early.

“Hey man, nice boots. Where’d you get them?”

“Thanks, L.L.Bean.” I made to keep walking.

“Listen man, you got to be careful out here. I turn 30 next week.”

“Congratulations.”

“No, you’re not hearing me, I’m about to be 30. I’ve been around. I’ve seen some shit. Seen people get jumped, shot, stabbed. I saw you pull out your wallet to get in here, now I know where it’s at. You can’t move like that around here.”

“All right, sure, thanks.” I walked away and waited until the subway came.

I remember one of my old roommates telling me why he doesn’t wear any clothing with objects, words, or other representational symbols on it. “It … Invites conversation.” So I just take my card out when I go to get on the subway now. 

Wallets invite conversation.

IX – IF YOU CAN GET TO KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN YOU CAN GET TO THE FUNERAL HOME

On Tuesday, September 16, 2014, at or around 5 p.m., the 7-11 cashier says “you must get all the girls, huh?” to me as I purchase a $1 bag of Fritos “flavor twists.” I think he meant that, at that moment in time, coming back from work wearing a tucked in polo and chinos, I had zero drip. I didn’t ask and I’ll never know for sure.

See, sometimes in life you don’t always have the information you need in a given situation. Like when I asked a grown man “what is your phone number please?” prompting him to lean away from the phone and yell, “MOM, WHAT’S MY TELEPHONE NUMBER?” That’s called utilizing the resources available to you to problem solve. 

That’s a growth mindset baby.

And I try to help people maintain that mindset. Like when I’m at [THE JOB] and the account I’m on says to tell callers looking for the funeral home to “follow the signs” and they ask me “what do the signs say?” 

I have no idea buddy. Just follow the signs. 

Usually accounts will have canned directions for us to regurgitate to callers that fall apart after the first question. We don’t get access to any kind of maps. I don’t know why and I never asked. 

The funeral home is next to the KFC. If you can get to the KFC, you can get to the funeral home.

Sorry, but I don’t know how to get to the KFC. I’m just with the answering service.

Another good one is when people call trying to get directions to the funeral home and ask questions about what it looks like. 

“Is it the red brick building with the green shutters?” 

I have no idea buddy. Neither of us has ever been there before. I tried to call a funeral director last month to tell him this guy was outside for a viewing and after I got through his 45 second long psych-rock ringback tone he laughed hysterically, said “that was hours ago,” and hung up.

I’ve learned that funeral directors aren’t the most interested people when it comes to holding your hand step by step to get you to your second cousin’s wife’s celebration of life. That was kind of “on you.”

So you know how to get to the KFC. You know how to get to the funeral home. Good for you. You’re outside? Cool. I’m not inside. 

I’m in a call center possibly hundreds of miles away from you surrounded by people with extremely noticeable local regional accents and a marked lack of empathy. This sucks for both of us, I know. Tell me your name, phone number, and why you’re out there and I’ll shoot your message into the void. 

Maybe someone will be with you—eventually.

Unless you’re right outside the funeral home trying to report a death. That’s the worst. Hearing the dawning realization in someone’s voice that something is terribly, terribly wrong as I take them through the mind-numbing questions of the death template instead of just getting someone to come open the door is heartbreaking at first and mildly annoying subsequently. But hey—it comes with [THE JOB].

X – NICE GUYS DON’T COME TO WORK

It’s casual Friday in late September. My boss, Rich, a mid-40s white man with a high-and-tight fade and a genteel southern accent, is wearing a white tee with a chain over it tucked into plaid cargo shorts. 

This is the man who decides whether my coworkers and I lose our jobs or not on a daily basis. 

Cool. 

Last month after killing a wasp he started cheering wildly and fist pumping.

Our bosses and supervisors get access to the internet. They mostly use it for online shopping and goofing off. We don’t, because they don’t trust us. Once you’ve worked at [THE JOB] for six months they let you listen to a digital radio with slightly worse selection than an early Grand Theft Auto game. Every time you get a call it cuts off—if you’re lucky, depending on your shift the call volume will be slow and you might get to listen to a whole song.

Rich turns to a supervisor and gestures to the front page of yahoo.com. Joan Rivers has been hospitalized, and ISIS has laid siege to Kobane under fierce U.S. airstrikes.

“Which do you think is more important,” Rich says, “Joan Rivers in the hospital, or ISIS?”

The supervisor gasps. “Joan Rivers is in the hospital?”

Hell yeah. I fuckin love this shit.

Later that day I hear them discussing how one of my coworkers was recently terminated for calling out.

“He was the nicest guy,” a supervisor says.

“Nice guys don’t come to work,” Rich responds.

XI – NICE GUYS DO COME TO WORK

There’s a lot of turnover at [THE JOB]. It’s partially due to the nature of the work, and partially due to the incredibly strict attendance policy which penalizes you for clocking in even a second late and makes weekend and holiday shifts mandatory. 

Occasionally, announcements would come over the company message board system stating, simply “[EMPLOYEE NAME] IS NO LONGER EMPLOYED AT [THE JOB].” Their initials would get taken off the schedule, and no one would talk about them again except to possibly gossip if they had firsthand knowledge about what happened.

I hit it off with this new guy named Mike who seemed like a pretty normal, funny guy from Jersey. He liked comics, and lent me his copy of Priest one time.

One day I came in and Mike was scheduled, but wasn’t there. After a couple days of this, I asked my coworker what was up. Apparently, the New Jersey Fugitive Task Force caught wind that Mike was working in Pennsylvania. Completely suited up and armed with long guns, they came up to the glass doors of [THE JOB] and rang the doorbell. 

After talking with them through the intercom, my supervisor went up to Mike and told him “Either you can go down there, or we’re going to let them up here.” He went down there.

They kept Mike’s initials on the schedule for a month before removing it. A ghostly reminder of the death of his employment there. Or maybe they thought he’d come back. I never really found out why they were looking for him, anyway. Someone said he had a drug-related federal warrant, but who knows. I never saw him again. Good thing I gave him his comic book back before that.

He was a nice guy. But nice guys don’t come to work.

XII – LAUGH NOW CRY LATER

I tell people when I talk about [THE JOB] now that I learned to deal with compassion fatigue in a very specific way. If someone is calling me to report a death, especially a grieving family member, they want the funeral home to come get their loved one. 

Full stop. 

That’s it. 

And if the person on the phone with them doesn’t repeatedly try to confirm that their name is spelled “Sherrly” (Shirley), that’s just a bonus. Me crying on the phone with them for ten minutes doesn’t help with that.

Not that sometimes I didn’t want to.

I don’t even remember a lot of the bad death calls. I don’t want to remember them.

To me, there was not a single noble or redeeming quality to being voyeuristically forced into some of the worst moments of peoples’ lives (that were also recorded and kept on file for “quality assurance” purposes) by [THE JOB].

When I talk about it to people I do a sort of verbal hand waving and say “it’s not like I didn’t have some calls I’ll never forget for the rest of my life, but the majority of them weren’t like that.” Laugh now cry later, you know? But honestly there’s only one of those calls I remember. I don’t talk about it.

“She was so cold.”

He found his daughter in the closet after she hung herself. He cut her down but by then it was too late.

 “She was so cold. I touched the back of her neck and she was cold.”

It’s not the crying, or the sobbing, or anything else that I remember. It was the simple observation of an utterly broken man.   

 “She was just so cold.”

XIII – COLD

“YOU’RE A DUMBASS. THIS IS WHY YOU TAKE MY CALLS,” a funeral director yells at me before hanging up angrily. 

I’m not really sure what point he was trying to prove there. 

I mean, personally I would want the qualifying attributes of someone answering my calls to be based in competency, not the opposite.

It’s been a long winter.

Beginning in early October, one of my coworkers on the verge of being fired for poor attendance started asking me to cover the last three-and-a-half hours of her shift. After I agreed a couple times, she started asking me every day, providing varying reasons why she needed help (and by extension why I should work twelve hour shifts every day). 

The period from 4 to 7 p.m. is typically the busiest for funeral homes, because you’re fielding calls from everyone getting off work in addition to the usual ones. Funeral directors are also wrapping things up for the night and calling in to switch over their lines, further boosting the call volume.

I took her hours for a month or so before I broke and started making excuses for why I couldn’t that were just as ridiculous as the ones she gave me. 

I live in a closet. I don’t need this shit.

It is consistently cold in the office. The air conditioning is on despite it being consistently below freezing outside. After numerous complaints, management issues a staff-wide bulletin stating they will not turn off the AC because they need it to keep the computers and servers from overheating. 

I reply and suggest that they just open all of the windows instead, since it’s basically the same thing. Management, insanely, considers my request but rebuffs it due to the possibility of noise pollution coming in from the road.

It’s going to be a long winter.

XIV – NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR JOB SECURITY

The winter of ’14 had a fair amount of freezing rain, and trust me when I say that SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) doesn’t need any excuse not to deliver, let alone a good one.

And don’t get me wrong, I love public transportation. I tell people, if I wanted to get jostled around in a crowded space with strangers while listening to music, I’d skip the house show and just go ride the bus instead.

But like I said, money never sleeps. Money can’t be late to work either, or call out, or it gets fired.

When a big storm is forecasted, [THE JOB] offers employees a fifty dollar incentive to sleep on the floor in the basement overnight, which adds up to thirty nine dollars after taxes. Thirty nine dollars for sleeping on the floor is pretty good, if you ask me. If I got thirty nine dollars for every time I slept on the floor I would be like a ten thousandaire, easy. 

But I’ve only ever gotten it once, and it sucked.

After that I started staying over at my partner’s college dorm more and more, because it was closer to my work and meant I could sleep in for an extra hour. I also could get them to swipe me into the cafeteria and get a free dinner in addition to grabbing breakfast and lunch for the next day. 

I would sleep on a fold-out futon chair thing underneath their lofted bed with a blanket hanging down, because technically I wasn’t supposed to be there, and sneak to and from the showers, appropriating measures of liquid soap from the undergrads who left their hygiene products out.

Getting free meals and paying less than three hundred dollars a month in rent from living in a closet was pretty much the only reason I was able to still make money during this period when my student loan payments started to hit.  

XV – HAZMAT

After 6 months at [THE JOB] they put you on the phone lines for a biohazard cleanup company.

It’s the company you call when someone blows their brains out, or gets hit by a train, or something. 

I learned a lot of people shoot themselves in their cars. Word to the wise: get out first. It will save your family thousands of dollars or the price/utility they would have gotten out of your car without having to replace the majority of the interior.

They handle a lot of stuff for police departments as well. Having a gruff policeman with a Boston accent try to clinically report, “we have uh, a situation here in the patrol car … the feces” for the first time is always kind of funny because you can professionally respond and be like “ah, yes, the feces. We’ll get you right over to a specialist sir.”

Taking those calls was pretty chill. The person’s body has already been taken care of (we probably took the call for that too), so there’s no rush. Emotions don’t run high. People are less cagey about talking to you, and if they are, they usually start talking when asked the wonderfully euphemistic question: “what is the situation?”

“Well sir, I’ll tell you what, the situation is that she just exploded with blood and fecal matter everywhere.”

Wow. We got a situation.

“My sister was a hoarder and by the time we got the place cleaned up we found out she had been defecating in paint buckets in the house for 6 months, and well, we thought things were better, but we found her dead in her house last week and she had been defecating in paint buckets for over a year this time.”

Oh yeah (in the tone of the Kool-Aid Man). Definitely a situation. Situation material.

Probably the coolest thing about answering for the hazmat company was that I figured this way that I could use part of their website to go online. [THE JOB] took away the URL bar, but didn’t realize that there were some news profiles of the company embedded in one of the informational pages. 

So you could just click over to that and get onto the Huffington Post, and read the news for like five seconds to a minute before another call came in. 

It’s the small victories.

XVI – “THERE IS A MOOSE IN THE CEMETERY CAN YOU PLEASE CALL THE POLICE THE MOOSE HAS BEEN IN THE CEMETERY FOR 30 MINUTES IT IS GETTING ANGRY PEOPLE ARE BECOMING SCARED”

“There was a rabbit outside that got hit by a car (sobs), and it’s still alive and dragged itself to the side of the road (sobs harder), and now it’s being attacked by crows, can someone please come outside and get it?”

Caller states that rabbit was hit by car outside the funeral home and is being attacked by crows. Can you come outside.

XVII – NOT A MOURNING PERSON

Most mornings I rode the trolley with this older guy, mid-50s probably, who I first noticed because I’m like 75% sure he was reading Harry Potter or Harry Potter fanfiction on his Kindle one time.

I ran into him waiting to get back to the city and he told me that earlier in the week, the sidewalk was too icy for him to walk up it so he just turned around and went back home, which honestly sounds so sick. To just get almost all the way to work but then decide it’s too hard and leave, and not get fired. Seems ideal.

Sorry boss, couldn’t make it in today. Safety first, you know?

Every week after that he would laboriously put on rubber overshoe crampons a couple stops before getting off, then totter up the street, scraping as he went.

It’s usually the same cast on the way to work. Me, Harry Potter fanfiction guy, my coworker Amy, and a few others.

Occasionally you’ll get a cameo, a one hit wonder, like the guy who sat in front of me once fastidiously reading the WikiHow page on “how to hold your pee.”

Or the guy who started me awake by shouting “HEY EVERYONE, BIG DADDY’S HERE,” as he got on, then proceeded to fall asleep holding his drink. The straw stayed in his mouth as his head lolled back, dripping slowly onto his shirt. Seeing that just felt magical. I couldn’t look away.

XVIII– GROUNDHOG DAY

As winter blustered on, I reached a degree of comfort with [THE JOB]. When you take enough calls and have your strategies in place, things tend to smooth out. When I first started, I would get a kick out of even the small things, like people getting their own names wrong. After months, I stopped even taking notes. Who cares.

Even in death, a semblance of routine.

The same telemarketers and scammers calling every day.

The Comcast service technician who had his Juicy J ringtone go off in the middle of a call, then started laughing hysterically when I was able to recognize the strains of “A Zip and A Double Cup” pouring through the phone line.

One man, earnestly asking, “I was wondering if the funeral director would come, and speak with our [rotary] club, about his experience … with Taco Bell.”

Sure. Must have been some experience. I hope he’s okay. “Of course. I’ll relay the message.”

Or a woman with a shaky voice, coming onto the line with her mind made up:

“Hello, is this—I have a can of Coble Valley Schloppy Joe Sauce, and I’d like a refund.”

If you got sloppy joe sauce from “Ohio Funerals and Cremations” you deserve way more than a refund lady, I’ll tell you what.

At this point no matter what, I thought I was immune. Even so, there’s always something to keep you on your toes.

A man called about a memorial service for a friend who died in the Korean War and was being repatriated. He started oversharing about his life, which I enjoyed, because it meant more time on the call with a known weirdo and less time spent on my shift with unknown and potentially angry weirdos.

Then he decided to start dropping straight bombs: 

“You know, I used to be in the Secret Service. I was with Kennedy on that day in Dallas. If you look up his speech in Fort Worth, I was the one in front wearing a white raincoat.”

I needed to ask. I wanted so badly to ask. I knew exactly how to phrase it. There was even a chance I wouldn’t get fired for doing it—but I decided not to, as my job and income flashed before my eyes.

So … what’s your take?

Just when you thought you’ve heard it all—something new.

XIX – WAITING FOR GODOT

When you’re waiting for your shift to end time takes on a mythical quality. The final push. Just a couple more calls and you’re out of there. Then, sometimes, it happens. Bizarro mode.

“I’m sorry, did you say—”

“I’M NOT GOING TO REPEAT MYSELF!”

“I just didn’t—”

“I’M NOT GOING TO REPEAT MYSELF!”

Dude, you like, just did. You just did.

“YOU KNOW, IT’S BECAUSE OF PEOPLE LIKE YOU—THAT I HAD AN ANEURISM. AND WHEN I HAD MY ANEURISM I WAS COMPLETELY INCAPACITATED, AND MY FRIENDS STOLE EVERYTHING FROM ME. SO I CALL AND CALL AND CALL UNTIL I GET A MIGRAINE, THEN I PUT A RUBBER BAND ON MY HEAD.”

Sure dude. Makes sense to me. After all that, who wouldn’t?

When I go to walk to the trolley to get back into the city the final part puts me in the service road to the office complex connecting the back of all the parking lots. It’s a weirdly liminal space, bordering the edge of the forest, with almost no foot traffic. It truly feels like anything could happen there. 

I remember seeing a Furby impaled on a fence post passing through once. Normal shit.

One afternoon, I saw a guy standing outside of his minivan carefully placing an opened package of chips ahoy cookies on the curb. We made eye contact.

“I’m out here looking for my cat.”

“Okay.”

“Have you seen a black and white cat?”

“No, sorry.”

A few days later I saw sitting in his van in the same spot. No cookies this time. When he noticed me he turned on his car and backed up real fast, crunching his bumper on the curb before he swerved away. I never saw him again.

Normal job. Normal world.

XX – IT’S YOUR FUNERAL

In February of 2016, about a year after I finally managed to quit [THE JOB], I was standing in the parking lot of a funeral home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as gusts of wind blew snow onto the ill-fitting peacoat I had found somewhere on the sidewalk years earlier. I specifically saved it for occasions like this.

Weddings and funerals.

This wasn’t a wedding.

My uncle came to the States after the war and landed a job as a professor at the University of Toledo. The story goes that he got an offer for a much better job in Montreal but turned it down so he could sponsor my dad and other family members to come over. My dad met my mom in the Detroit area so in a way I guess I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for that.

I owe you one dude.

During the family only visitation I got too in my head about the degree of grief vs. emotional warmth I should show to my aunt and cousins, but that wasn’t an issue during the next day’s service because I was sad as shit, crying most of the time, and therefore, “doing me.”

Afterwards, I walked down the hallway to where the funeral directors, a group of three men and one woman, were standing talking amongst themselves in hushed voices.

“Thank you,” I said, shaking hands with them. They gave me somber, professional condolences. The picture of professionalism.

Until I told them I used to work for their answering service. Suddenly, the professional veneer dropped. The excited questions started flowing rapid fire. What was it like there? Did we sit in cubicles, or all in one room? Did we use headsets?

I happily obliged their questions. After all, it was just another normal job in a normal world.

Mini-interview with Randall Le

HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?

RL: In the early 2010s I used to take frequent long-haul train and bus rides from Philadelphia to Michigan. The first leg of the trip passes through the Appalachian Mountains on the way into Pittsburgh.

I remember passing through a little town, built into the side of a hill. Everything’s old, looks old. And I’m staring out the window—it’s getting dark out, so people have their lights on. I’m staring into houses, and I see this guy standing in the middle of his kitchen with his shirt off, drinking directly from a two-liter bottle of orange soda.

That’s a beautiful moment of his that I shared, and the only one I ever will. Part of existing as a being in time is that every moment gained is simultaneously forever lost. Riding along, staring out the window, it hammers that home. Everything is a glimpse, a fleeting image, a sense of longing for what’s already gone. Writing is how I claw those moments and feelings back.

HFR: What are you reading?

RL: There There, by Tommy Orange.

HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “[THE JOB]”?

RL: Yeah, of course. I was working a gig answering telephones for funeral homes. They had this real strict no-distractions type policy: no phone, no access to the internet, nothing. The only thing they give you is a pen and paper, so you can write stuff down. I took notes on stuff that was going on, things that happened, things people said, just to pass the time. After I left, the notes got stuffed in a folder with my personal keepsakes for like 5 years.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw news clips of mobile morgue trucks moving into some of the cities and wondered what was going on back at my old job with all this death. So I pulled down my old notes from the closet to take a look, and a couple years later here we are.

HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?

RL: Right now I’m working on a short story titled “One Night in Brattleboro,” which is about exactly what the title says.

HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?

RL:  want to thank my sister Aimee a ton for supporting me. I’m hardly much of a writer by trade and wouldn’t have even thought to share this story with anyone without her encouragement.

Randall Le is a normal guy (but everyone thinks he’s cool). He was the sole administrator of the blog Doorknob Imprints, dedicated to cataloging the imprints doorknobs make on the wall when opened too forcefully, which has long since been abandoned due to lack of public interest. He can be found on Twitter @REALxDUMBASS. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

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