1997- OK COMPUTER

You look so tired, unhappy

I was dating a flight attendant. Or, a flight attendant wanna-be, anyway. She certainly looked the part. Tall, blonde, well endowed. She was a friend of my roommate’s friend, and we hit it off when the two of them came to visit.

She was living in Chicago while she was in training, and we’d get together at Red Lobsters and TGI Fridays out in the suburbs when I’d come to visit. Our visits were brief, and I’d have to have her back by 1:00 on Sunday afternoons. There would be hell to pay if she was late.

I’d heard the Flight Attendant School horror stories. Makeup that wasn’t put on right, an imperfect walk down the aisle, leaning too close to the “passengers” on the mock jet while serving them drinks, a.k.a. being too fat. These were all reasons for disqualification. And if you were too fat and you showed up late, well, then forget about it.

She wasn’t fat, but she was miserable. She thought she would love taking off and landing all day long and serving drinks, but the pressure was enormous and she was beginning to have her doubts. With almost nothing in common, it was probably the job dissatisfaction that kept us together.

A job that slowly kills you

I worked in the technical service department of a medical products company. Whenever my phone rang I had to diagnose what was wrong with the blood glucose meters that nurses in hospitals across the country were using. There wasn’t a lot of detective work involved. It would come as a complete shock if the call was anything other than the meter showing an “error 1” or an “error 4”. The answer was always the same. We’d send a new meter out, and include a postage label for them to send the old one back.

So I was on autopilot most of the time. For a while the internet saved my brain from turning to mush. Then they blocked it. Which was kind of cool for a while. It gave me a far more engaging challenge. I’d have to find ways to get outside their “intranet”. Once I got to yahoo, I was usually home free. Eventually they caught on and tightened things up further.

Before going to work I started to do a quick surf of my favorite sights, copying and pasting articles I thought might interest me later in the day and then sending them to my work email address. Usually by mid-morning I had exhausted these resources and needed more. Joe came to the rescue.

I’d send him emails with subject lines like “a job that slowly kills you” and describe the torturous environment I spent 8 hours of my day at in which to pay the rent. Whether it was getting too much information about the sex life of my overweight bearing coworker or getting crap from the scientists who worked there for not being scientific like them and earning a better paycheck, Joe was a sympathetic ear.

Bruises that won’t heal

To every “a job that slowly kills you” email I’d send, Joe had a “bruises that won’t heal” response. He had taken a job through a temp service, but the owner of the company sat down with Joe on day one to chat. That had a brief talk where Joe told him that we was “pretty into vinyl” and the guy got excited thinking that Joe knew a thing or two about vinyl siding. Telling Bossman that he had a vintage copy of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music was not the way to ingratiate himself.

Still, Bossman told Joe he didn’t like working with temp services, and that he wanted Joe to be his employee. But Bossman made it clear that he had to pay off the temp service to free Joe of the contract, and he threw the dollar amount in Joe’s face every time he didn’t like what he did, claiming that Joe would owe him that money if he quit or got let go. He told Joe he was grooming him to be a professional and maybe “run the company some day”. He used this excuse to remind Joe to tuck in his shirt like a real man. Or in one case, zip up his zipper.

When Bossman would leave to attend to his other businesses, Joe would do the only thing he could think of to preserve his sanity. He surfed the internet, and often times he’d cut and paste articles he thought might interest me and send them. Music reviews, interviews, political stories, News Of The Weird. Anything was better than my “error 1, error 4” existence.

Phew, for a minute there I lost myself

Joe had a habit of putting the word “the” in front of bands. Wilco became “The Wilco”. Radiohead, “The Radiohead”. It was probably the “The-ing” of Radiohead that kept me from going to see them play at the State Theater with Joe soon after Ok Computer came out. Going to see The Radiohead just didn’t sound all that appealing. That, and the CD had yet to penetrate my every thought and become my soundtrack for a year or two.

My infatuation with Ok Computer began on a Sunday afternoon after the flight attendant girlfriend left to go back to Chicago. Joe was out of town. I sat in my music room where I’d recently demoed some songs and listened to my dubbed copy of Ok Computer over and over again with the afternoon sun shining in on me and a nice breeze blowing through the room. Joe had bought Ok Computer, but I’d made sure to make a copy before he left. With a little alone time to really listen to it, everything clicked. It would be one of the my most played albums. It spoke to me in every sense of the cliche.

Still, I regret not going to that show. I’ve been able to catch some of my favorite bands within a few weeks of getting into them, but this would not be the case with Radiohead. I’d have to wait until the summer of 2001. But when I finally did see them in Chicago’s Grant Park after pretty much giving up on large outdoor shows, it was incredible. Probably the best show on that kind of scale that I’d seen in my life.