A Career in Testicolor®
Getting your foot in the 3rd Basement Floor door.
2
Our hero drove east across SR-520 one grey morning. He raced to reach a suburb of Redmond called Kirkland. Redmond was itself a suburb of Seattle, but let’s not get carried away. Suburbception in Puget Sound is madness. The point is it was done in a heroic hurry on an early, grey morning. He had a date with Destiny, and she'd left an e-mail imploring him to get tested.
Really, the e-mail had come from a “games quality company” and it was quite a bit more enthusiastic than somber.
“Play video games! Get paid! No experience necessary!”
Our skeptical subject had read that e-mail with the negligent disbelief accompanying him his whole life. He was an avid collector of wrong-think habits like skepticism and cynicism. Far from believing everything he read, he only believed everything he said. If only for that moment.
Still, he read quite a bit. Not books, of course. He couldn't keep his attention on anything other than breasts for longer than thirty seconds. But he could read a few sentences strung together. Like the following blurb he found on the back of every single Nintendo Entertainment System video game box he'd ever got his hands on.
Nintendo of America
4600 150th Ave NE
Redmond, WA 98052
Growing up in Spokane, Washington, he'd once asked his father where Redmond was.
“The U.S.S.R.”
“Is it far? I want to go there, someday.”
“You and Bernie Sanders,” He cryptically and anachronistically replied. “But it's closer than it seems.”
“Good.”
“Nope.”
Our perfect idiot had played video games for years. Still does. When he was the age of three or four, his older sister scored perfect grades at school. This triggered the Bribery Clause of a contract with the parents stating she was to receive a Nintendo as reward. An odd arrangement all told, as neither she nor the parents ended up enjoying video games at all.
But our doddering dullard? Loved them. His firsts were Duck Hunt and Gyromite, which came with the console. Games have been with him as long as his memories. Longer in some cases. He had an acid phase. But he can still remember the harsh CLICK-CLICK sound of the overly tight spring-loaded NES Light Gun trigger as he tried to murder that Duck Hunt dog in a blind rage.
Eh-eeh-eh-eeh. Eh-eeh-eh-eeh.
He pulled up to a nondescript office building in Kirkland. Grey and unassuming with a parking garage beneath two stories banded with windows, it looked just like a million others all over office park infected corporate America. By 7:30 in the morning, he wagered it was already full of corporate Americans, too.
He walked the perimeter of the building until finding a glass door and pushed his way inside. He followed printed out dot matrix signs taped to the wall, pointing the way down white, slightly yellowed halls until he entered a large, low ceilinged lobby. He wasn't sure what he expected from the lobby of a company offering to pay people to play games. But it wasn't what he saw.
A pretty lady sat behind a desk, peering out from behind stacks of towering papers. She held court from a folding throne behind a folding desk, facing three rows of similar seats. Two dozen dead-eyed men and boys sat upon them. Some so fat they sat on two. He turned to the pretty lady leader of the flock.
She waved over our puzzled protagonist to ask. “What's your name, sugar?”
“Rob Lamb.”
“Are you sure it's not Nesto?” She bubbled. “How do you spell that?”
“N-O-T-N-E-S-T-O. But Rob Lamb is spelled with two B's. At the ends.”
“Like Robb Lam?”
“No. Like Rob Lamb.”
“Got it, sugar! Have a seat. We'll call your name if you're picked.”
“It sounds like you spelled it wrong.”
“Don't you worry, sugar,” she assured him. “I've been spelling for a while by now."
She motioned our hero to take a seat alongside the two-dozen other adult boys of varying size, shape, and smell. Despite wild differences, they shared a similarness. A sameness of a sort. Our hero took a deep breath through his nostrils as realization struck him and he named the enemy aloud to destroy its power.
“Desperate virginism.”
This made him no friends among the desperate virgins, who had no doubt whenever those words were uttered together, they were directed at their poor, virginal persons. But it did conjure a polite chuckle from a pretty lady, which is all a funny man can hope for in life. He was in with her. She was probably one of those people it was really easy to get inside of.
He pondered the proper term for intentionally butchering syntax as a fellow paused in what appeared to be the production of a chain mail shirt - or a skirt there was no need to discriminate - and looked up at him with the innocent, cow eyes of an enemy. Setting his tiny tongs and tiny bars of metal he was twisting into interwoven links aside, he stood, held out his hand, and introduced himself.
“Duderich Lakcharm, at thy service. Thou art of the newly arrivals?”
Rob nodded, somehow expecting the sonofabitch to speak that way as he grasped a smooth, silky soft and clammy palm. He thought blacksmiths had rough hands. “Yep. What’s up?”
“Thou shalt havest a seat upon thy fundament until such time as thine lady fair callest thy name,” Duderich offered.
“Coolestvillage, Duderino,” Rob replied. “What are we waiting for?”
“Many pardons, sir. Verily, I havest signeth the mighty NDA, a power most binding, and can forthcome nary a detail until thy hand also maketh they marks upon its countenance,” Duderich intoned.
“Now see here, sir,” Rob protested. “I'm as understanding and progressive as the next man but a man's medical history and what they sleep with is none of my business.”
“Wow,” Duderich exclaimed. “No. Just no.”
Rob immediately didn’t care for this fellow with all his fancy-falluting and clammy, sweaty palms, but he knew better than to pick a fight with a stranger making chainmail in a Kirkland corporate office park. He’d been thrown out of that rodeo before. He knew Duderich was preparing for war, just not who with, and a wise man never slaps a fellow chewing tobacco. So, he sat upon his fundament and awaited his name’s call.
Duderich, for his part, simply sat and set to twisting metal strips into links again with the patience of a stupid, dull fucking ox.
At about 8:30 a bustle of activity kicked around the pretty lady's desk and a less than pretty man in a mullet and glasses started rattling off names. Duderich’s name came first, followed by a dozen more. Despite most certainly being misspelled, none of the names were Rob's. He would have to try his luck the day after. And the day after that. And the one following, this hell repeating, as long as it took to figure out what in the hell was going on in this Kirkland swamp.
So, every day our hero returned to the swamp with its lonely, squat two-story tower. Every day, the same pretty, illiterate lady added his name to the list. And the same every day, a collection of names which weren’t his were called. His frustration mounted, as well as the cumulative cost of gasoline necessary to drive a clunky Chevy Cavalier forty miles each day just to be disappointed.
Still, with our hero’s spotlessly absent work history, it was this or Labor Ready. In fact, he vowed if a few days went by and they didn’t call his name, it would be Labor Ready anyway. There was one within striking distance from his apartment on Greenwood Avenue, in fact. It would be the easiest thing in the world to get some work.
But as he told anyone who asked, he wasn’t above manual labor. It was just beneath him. A man could break a sweat doing that kind of thing, after all. And if there's one thing our subject hated more than anything else, it was sweating. A man shouldn’t be moist. A man isn't a clam. He's a man. Barely, in our subject’s case.
On the tenth morning, the taciturnly mysterious, bespectacled and bemulleted giant finally produced pay dirt.
“Nesto. No last name.”
“That's me.”
Mullet frowned as he trained four bleary eyes on him. “What's you?”
“Nesto,” Rob pointed at the sewn nametag on his Jiffy Lube shirt. “No last name.”
“No one asked. Just follow the guy with the chain mail down the hall to the hardware lab.”
“Okay. Do I need a weapon? That dude has armor.”
“Oh good. A funny man. That'll last. Go.”
Our funny man waddled after ugly duck Duderich, who held his chain mail makings under his arm like a purse, stopping in front of a door. It was nondescript, like the rest of the blank canvas corporate office building. Its only distinguishing feature was a taped, white piece of paper with Mt. Hood written on it in black marker and a black box on the wall next to it. He didn't know what was behind that door, but he had shown up every day for two weeks to find out, apparently.
The dozen or so nerds milled about, uncertain what came next or what they were waiting for. All except Mr. Chainmail, who looked bored rather than directly at anyone. It wasn't his first trip behind the door. He'd braved the mystery, sewn his lips. and survived. He'd even come back for more. They stopped with ten other dudes, all white and mostly smelly, in front of a door halfway down a fifty-foot hall. They may as well have lined up for a cattle knocking. With Duderich as stool pigeon for the rancher.
Our hero figured it couldn't be so bad if someone going by ‘Duderich’ could handle it. Still, his hands had started to sweat. Gods it was clammy. Someone should turn down the suspense in there.
What in God’s name is this?
Way to go, Nesto!
: )