Soft Serve

Soft Serve

I was just putting the finishing touches on a spreadsheet purporting to show how I’d saved Grinnel a chunk of change, when I heard my buddy in the adjoining cubicle banging some desk drawers around. I turned to see him tossing files into the garbage, and piling his family pictures and chotchkes into a box. “Hey, what’s up?” I asked in alarm, although I had an idea it had something to do with this morning’s client. He stopped the frenetic activity just long enough to give me the hairy eyeball. His curly mop was sticking to his forehead, and his nose looked like it had been recently blown.

“Giscard D’Estaing just gave me the boot!” he stage-whispered at me, smirking and thumbing over his shoulder to the corner office. Giscard: that was our moniker for the manager of this department. He’d earned it by suggesting that every woman on the floor was hot for him, and by his strange substitution of French for some everyday words-- like when he’d say, “that report on Kimmerling’s last shipment has to be sur mon bureau by 3 pm at the latest”. We’d always snicker as he walked away, “trez bee-yen, mun seenyure !” and guffaw into our rancid coffee cups. I knew Giscard was mean, but would he really do this to Rick, our loyal, if a bit lazy, but not more lazy than the average employee, Grinnel’s Funnel Shops clerk?

Grinnel’s was a distribution point for soft ice-cream makers, both assembling and distributing them. My job was to use a 1950’s algorithm to calculate what new parts we had to order after receiving requests begging for them from the vintage assembly floor (the manager wasn’t so old, but the operation sure was). The calculation had something to do with current inventory – I wasn’t using the Just-in-Time method, rather the Just-to-Keep-Them-Off-My-Back method. It was this fancy accounting, explained in the fanciest terms, that kept me on Giscard’s Favorites list.

But Rick’s job was more grueling than mine. He was a ‘relationship manager’ who handled client calls, often fielding complaints about the operation of the machines. In this way he had to balance the customer service we so brilliantly supplied, with his own weak-kneed ego. I encouraged him to have them make love to him by the end of these conversations, but it didn’t always go so well. That morning I had heard him say, with some emphasis on the wrong word, “Then get your own fucking State of the Art Mr. Softee replacement !” to a client who must have been a roadie, as we called those trucks. I was just happy to know that somewhere in America, an annoying jingle had been stilled.

I jumped on this recent memory. “Did it have anything to do with the Roadie call you got this morning?”

“Nah…..” Rick looked deeply into the box he was loading, as if the answer were in there among his Plexiglas Number One in Customer Service awards. “Mike, it’s just too messed up to go into right now. Suffice to say, the Master doesn’t want to see my face on these premises again. You get yourself over to the house tonight and we can cry into our beers about it”. And like the laborer he was, he shouldered the box and headed over to the elevator. I watched him drive away in that car he bought last month, wondering how much of it he still had to pay for.

By now the rest of the floor was standing around staring over their cubicle walls, itching to ask me what had happened. I identified them easily as creepy coworkers who relished the misfortune they narrowly escaped, which Evil had magically skipped over them and landed on Rick. So I announced purposefully, and in a 360-degree manner, “Mind your own business, idiots.” and they servilely sat down again.

That night I went around to his house. Merrill opened the door, a cute little girl in sweats and her super-straight hair held back by bandanna – well, you might say not so girlish now that she must be in her 40’s. Money doesn’t seem to have affected her choice of career (music teacher) or her mode of dress, so I reasoned that Rick’s job loss wouldn’t unduly strain their relationship. “Glad to see you, Mike” she said, without looking very glad at all. I said, “Grinnel’s won’t be Rick’s last job, I guess” and she answered, “Let’s hope not, it wasn’t my choice for him in the first place.”

She led me into the living-room, where I noticed the cat curled up on the piano bench and newspapers all over the coffee table. Rick was sitting staring at the TV while not seeming to really see the basketball game being broadcast. He turned it off when he saw me, and offered to get me a beer. I declined, saying “Sure kid, but first tell me what happened to you-- I’ve been hatching all kinds of ideas all day and fighting off the press”.

Merrill arranged herself in the window seat, hands in her lap and an unnaturally patient expression on her face. I took a seat on the couch next to Rick, who started to explain. He seemed kind of stupefied, but he’d clearly been processing his change of fortune over the last few hours and was ready to report.

“I got a phone call this morning from Curtiss Cookies, that store in D.C. that signed our contract in November, but refused the maintenance agreement. Remember them?” I nodded to show that I did, although I wasn’t as interested in his arrangements as he supposed. “Well, since they didn’t buy the maintenance, they didn’t clean it right. And since they didn’t clean it right, it started cranking out powdered shit instead of soft serve. Herbert, the guy who owns the place, called up this morning and had the balls to blame me!”

“But you’re not responsible for it, since they didn’t ask for maintenance.”

“Right, but then they claimed the machine wasn’t even installed right, so I had to pass that on to Giscard.” The cat, a great over-fed, brown-and-white marbled thing, had leapt off the bench and glided over to Rick. Rick started stroking it therapeutically, until we could all hear it gutturally purring.

“Giscard came out to my desk to find out what happened. Now I hear they’re planning a lawsuit-- one of their customers got sick and is suing them, so they’ve turned around and sued us. You know, you may lose your job, too!”

I received this news skeptically. Grinnel’s needed me to keep manipulating the inventory. “Rick, it doesn’t sound bad enough yet, what am I missing?”

Then he nodded his head down, pursed his lips and stared at me over the rims of his glasses. “So Giscard came out to me and told me that stuff about the lawsuit, and then he said, like we had been best friends for years and were just shooting the breeze over a hard case, ‘did you ever meet Herbert’s wife, Bette ?’ and of course I did, six months ago you know, we make these contracts in person, we inspect the shop and vet the number of machines we can sell them.

“It was a slow day at Curtiss. She made me go behind the counter with her and gave me a taste of their stuff from the old machine, and it was pretty good. Chocolate with almond sprinkles I still remember! That Bette, she wouldn’t leave me alone—while I stood there licking the thing she kept getting real close to me, talking about Herbert’s sad sack business deals and how she could make a profit if he just stayed out of her way. Then she really came on to me, talking about my hair cut and shit like that, playing with me. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

I chanced a look at Merrill. She was still stolidly sitting in her seat with a neutral expression.

“I told Giscard right away, hey-- Bette’s a looker and sick of Herbert. And that was it, an hour later he called me into his office and told me it was over. Turns out I needed to keep my mouth shut about our clients, since Bette had told someone else – I found out later he meant his wife, that this shop is gonna fail because of this ice cream machine I sold her.

“And then 10 minutes later Sal comes over, and tells me this Herbert is Giscard’s wife’s brother. So I’m supposed to believe the brother-in-law asks him to fire me for not selling them a maintenance add-on?! I don’t believe it. I think Herbert’s got a good reason to suspect Bette’s fooling around, and Giscard fired me because he’s the one she’s fooling with”.

I said I’d take that beer now. I thought I could work this to Rick’s advantage, but we’d need Bette’s cooperation and a labor lawyer.