Batteries Galore
Summit Mall, Fairlawn, OH
Everyone has had job interviews they wish they could forget; answers you bungled; jokes you flubbed; names you muddled. But have you ever had an interviewer ask you a technical question, and then knocked yourself unconscious?
I have.
When things go bad for me in a job interview, it’s never in a way that you would find covered in a career advice book, where a simple rewording of an answer could have saved the situation. When they go bad for me, they don’t go bad at the “employment” level; they go bad at the human level.
I was interviewing at Batteries Galore, a narrow kiosk in the center of a mall that sold all kinds of batteries, some of which were fairly obscure. The store did very little business and made most of its money— meager though it was—from changing the batteries of out-of-warranty watches and supplying odd, hard-to-find appliance batteries.
The manager took me to a pizza shop next door and asked a few opening questions; general inquiries about life and work. It went well and, after we ate, she took me inside the kiosk to show me more of the store. Her assistant manager knew me from a previous job— we were essentially drinking buddies at this point—and recommended me. Th ings were looking up. The manager began showing me inventory as though I were to be her next employee.
Before we advance further, I should share a detail of my childhood that is essential to this story: my brothers and sisters and I used to lick nine-volt batteries.
If you place a nine-volt battery on your tongue—if you squish both terminators against the ol’ licker—your body completes the circuit and a quick, silly electrical charge can be felt inside your mouth. We thought it was hilarious and would dare each other to do it if we got a Christmas gift with a nine-volt battery. What’s more, my father would routinely ask us to lick the batteries of our smoke detectors in order to verify that they still worked. My dad trained us to learn about the world of electronics the same way babies learn about the objects in their cribs: put it in your mouth.
W e were now inside the kiosk and the manager opened a drawer of unmarked, rectangular batteries— theylooked like nine-volt batteries, maybe a fingerbreadth bigger—and she asked, “How would you describe your overall level of battery knowledge?”
I knew next to nothing about batteries. I had been lying through my teeth during the entire interview. But, when she asked me to rank my battery savvy, I answered her, confi dently:
“I would rate myself as an expert. Or, if I may: above.”
I grabbed one of the rectangular batteries from the drawer, and lifted it up toward my mouth. At this point I should probably mention that, as it turns out, these were not nine-volt batteries. They were sixty-five-volt garage-door-opener batteries. So I had miscalculated the energy in this cube by about 700 percent. I then asked my would-be boss a question of my own:
“You ever do this?”
I placed the battery square against my tongue and immediately electrocuted myself unconscious. I threw it back into my mouth like a spy trying to commit suicide before capture. The next few minutes were related to me later by various participants who were at the scene. One detail I was unaware of at the time was that there was a display case of watch bands that had been on the floor to make room for the inventory tour. My unconscious body fell onto that case and shattered it completely. I was further told there had been a customer present waiting to get his watch battery replaced, standing there with his two daughters. He swept both of them into his arms and ran away like people were being shot. Likely, he assumed I had died and, as a dad on a tight schedule of errands, felt he couldn’t aff ord the time to get pulled into a police report.
The manager—a woman so young she had probably never given a job interview before, let alone witnessed someone assassinate themselves right in front of her— panicked. Previously, her biggest worry had been running out of AA Duracells; now she had an unconscious body on the floor of her kiosk and the only identifying info she had was my high school résumé. I often wonder how that 911 call sounded:ß
“A man just electrocuted himself inside my store!”
“Is he breathing? What can you tell us about him?”
“He once worked at Lady Foot Locker and types forty-five words a minute.”
WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?
Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.
This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.
Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.
Purchase Full Book:
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$19.99This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.
I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.
—S. B-F
The social dynamics of electrocuting yourself in a kiosk, as opposed to a full retail store, are interesting. Unlike a store, where everyone can see your unconscious body on the floor and immediately realize there is a problem, in a kiosk you collapse behind the counter and you kind of just disappear. So, to passersby at the mall, all they saw was a woman at the register of a battery kiosk freaking out for no visible reason; like she was having the world’s most fervent panic attack about a battery that wouldn’t recharge.
The next day I got a phone call from the assistant manager of that kiosk (my drinking buddy who had recommended me for the job). She was livid.
“I told them you were the smartest person I know! I talked you up like you were so smart I was lucky to even know you. And then you put a fucking battery in your mouth?”
“Listen,” I responded calmly, “that battery was unmarked and, I want you to know, that is the fi rst thing I plan on changing as your employee.”
She laughed as I continued to joke that, in my eyes, the interview went quite well:
“At a minimum, you now know those batteries still work and there is no reason to discount them. I performed a service!”
Two days later, I’m not sure who was laughing— maybe God—when the manager of the Batteries Galore called and said, yes, I was the best candidate she interviewed. She off ered me the job.
I was dumbstruck, silent for the first time in a long time (probably since I knocked myself unconscious). Who, I wondered, were the other people interviewing for this job? Did someone outright decapitate themselves? How did a man who electrocuted himself unconscious become the top candidate?
“So, do you not accept?” she asked after a delay.
“Yes! Of course! Th ank you! Sorry. I accept! I’m just surprised…I mean, I nearly killed myself in the interview and, on top of that, I think we can both agree I was—at minimum—exaggerating about being a battery expert, so…well, I guess, I wasn’t expecting to hear back.”
“Look,” she answered in a deeper, very deliberate tone, “this job doesn’t pay well; for you or me. So what’s the point, if you’re not having fun? I’m off ering you the job because it seemed like, assuming you don’t kill yourself, you’d be fun to work with.”
“Well, that is my goal.”
“To have fun?”
“No, to not accidentally kill myself.”
W hen one looks back on an old job, you always wonder what happened to certain people: “What could he or she possibly be doing nowadays?” you ask yourself. When I look back at Batteries Galore, I usually wonder what happened to that man who ran away with his daughters after seeing me electrocute myself during a job interview. More generally, I often ask: how many strangers, over the years, thought they had just seen me kick the bucket?
The clearest victim of all my bad decisions is myself—the bones I’ve broken, the jobs I lost, the tongues I’ve electrocuted—but I often reflect on those downstream, forgotten suff erers: the bystanders who just returned from the mall; the Browns game; the turnpike; all convinced they had just witnessed a death. Hell, half the time I had done something so stupid, they probably assumed I was committing suicide.
Imagine taking your kids out to run errands…and if you are a parent you know there is no fate worse than bringing your kids on errands. When you see a parent running a weekend errand with multiple kids you can safely assume the purchase is so important the family will die without it. You may even assume the other parent is dead, because that’s about what it would take for my wife or I to agree to take all three of our children to the hardware store alone.
Have you ever seen a cartoon where one of the characters is sleepwalking, so the other character is constantly running ahead, putting down boards to save the sleepwalking character from falling into a well? Running errands with kids is a bit like doing that but you’re also looking for the paint aisle. One child is about to topple headfi rst out of the grocery cart; the other is touching a power saw; and, as to you try to navigate the store without one of your off spring dying, the eldest is asking non-stop questions about where money comes from or if the store is allowed to kill robbers and did dinosaurs ever eat cavemen?
Imagine balancing all that and, just as you’re about to accomplish one of the errands—to finally cross something off the list—an employee puts a battery in his mouth and shocks himself dead in front of your kids! So you run outside of the mall because you don’t have time to have the police ask you a bunch of questions, but in the excitement you can’t recall where you parked and your kids are asking:
“Is that man dead?”
“Is he in heaven?”
“When are we gonna eat?”
You can’t find your car, you now have to explain the afterlife and, worst of all, your watch still doesn’t have a battery.