Comp USA

Fairlawn, OH

"W          hy did you get fired this time?” my dad asked after seeing that I was not dressed for work.

“Dad, hand to God,” I replied, “I was fired for having too big of a vocabulary.”

“Sean, if that’s the full story, then I’m Saint Peter, walking the Earth."
 

I have always maintained that that was the full story, but the manager who fired me probably tells it differently.

And perhaps I was focused on the vocabulary issue to soften my dad’s frustration. My dad has the largest vocabulary of anyone I know and he had recently come to notice that, for a kid in high school (as I was at the time of this story), my own vocabulary was growing impressively. He enjoyed quizzing me on words and etymologies, probably because—given how terrible my grades were and how often I was fired from jobs—phraseology was one of the few topics where he could have a conversation with me and walk away with the impression that I might be employable one day.

My dad started to notice my vocabulary during a disagreement we’d had about the SAT. He wanted me to prepare diligently for the test.

I told him: “You either know it or you don’t. Nothing can change it.”

“Sean,” he countered, “those questions; they might seem impossible, but with training you can break down the etymology and structures. Maybe guess a few right. For instance, they showed me words I had never seen before or since. Try this one on for size, Sean. What’s a ‘fetlock’?”

“Going down from the hip, it’s the second joint on the leg of a horse,” I answered.

“What?”

My dad was amazed I had answered that question correctly. He couldn’t believe I might test better than him—it was the only question he got wrong on the verbal portion—and he was therefore annoyed by the possibility that I might know more words than him.

He never pestered me about the SAT again.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the reason I knew that word was because I regularly skipped high school to bet on horses and ‘fetlock’ featured frequently on injury reports.

When I did eventually take the SAT—or at least, when I was supposed to—I was out of my mind with a hangover, walked into the wrong room by mistake, and took a citizenship test instead. To this day, I have no SAT score and, if I’m being honest, I don’t think my vocabulary grew much after high school. I can diagram the hell out of a horse, though.

Maybe my vocabulary stopped growing after high school because I lost a job due to the size of it, and I realized the world hates a person that sounds too elitist. But, again, that’s according to my version of the story as opposed to my manager’s. He probably says he fired me because I was a terrible employee.
 

A t the time, I worked at a CompUSA and I entered the store one day to find another employee, Randy, speaking with a frustrated customer in the cable aisle. The customer needed a cable to connect his monitor to a computer, but inadvertently purchased the wrong cable (a cable extension rather than a replacement). Randy was trying to explain the difference, but the customer kept insisting that both cables were the same:

“No sir, you bought this cable,” Randy explained while holding the extension-cable in the air. “This cable makes the other cable reach farther. But you still need the other cable for it to work.”

But they look the same.”

“No, see, the pins are different.” Randy rotated both cables around to show the clearly different configurations: that the extension cable was male-to-female while the replacement cable was male-to-male.

“No, you’re not understanding it, kid! I need a totally different kind of cable!” the customer insisted.

At this point Randy noticed me and exclaimed, “Oh, there’s Sean! He’s our cable expert; perhaps he can explain it better than me.”

At each computer store I worked at there was a tradition whereby employees tried to pass stupid customers on to the next team member in a funny or creative way; a kind of “idiot hot potato.” Whenever you heard another employee identify you as an expert on a topic you knew nothing about, you knew they were trying to unload a moron.

Occasionally though, an employee would dump their idiot in such a creative way that you didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. Once a boss paged me over the loudspeakers by announcing:

“Sean Flannery to customer service. We have a gentleman with an I-D-TEN-T error.”

It wasn’t until later I realized that “I-D-TEN-T” spells out “IDIOT” when written down.

Other times someone might say: “Sean, would you come over here? I’m dealing with a really fascinating PMAC error,” which you would later learn stands for “Problem exists between Monitor And Computer,” that the user is the problem. But on this particular day at CompUSA, I was summoned over via the most common method: being introduced as a subject-matter expert. This was a popular maneuver mainly because it worked like a charm; a moron always believes they are correct and is waiting for an expert to join the conversation so that someone else is operating at their rarefied level.

“Thank God!” the customer said to me after Randy flagged me down. “This idiot has been trying to get me to repurchase the same bad cable for the last twenty minutes!”

Randy smiled, with that wide, sinister grin people have when they know their terrible problem is now someone else’s, kind of like a guy who’s just sold a haunted house. Randy exited backwards, waving to me and laughing impishly.

“OK, sir,” I said, “you need a cable to connect your new monitor with your computer, right? And you bought this cable that doesn’t work, right?” “Yes!” he cried with relief.

“It’s the terminators, sir,” I explained politely. “This one has the two ends you need, see? Same ends on both sides. Look at that, versus the one you got?”

I showed him the cables. The correct cable had fifteen pins sticking out of a trapezoidal port on each end. The incorrect cable, that he bought, had fifteen pins on one end, and fifteen holes on the other, not pins, so it can’t be inserted into the computer; only connected to another cable with the corresponding pins. It even said “EXTENSION CABLE” in capital letters on the packaging.

“Damn it you don’t get it either?” he sighed. “I need a different kind of cable.”

I pressed on. I was an “expert” after all.

“Sir, it’s just the terminators. It’s a common mistake; they are very similar, and you purchased the incorrect one. You need a male-male cable. Not female-male.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Male-male.” I showed him the cable with the pins sticking out on both sides.

“I don’t know all your computer terms!” he snapped, exasperated.

“OK, no problem sir,” I continued, trying a different tack, “how about this: I want you to not think of this as a computer problem, and, instead, let us just do word association.”

I showed him the replacement cable with pins on each side again, “See how each end of this cable has pins that are EEE-RECT? That’s a MAAALE, sir.”

At this point I was speaking to him so loudly, and with such condescension—the way a jerk might teach English to a classroom full of non-English speakers—that a small crowd had gathered, including my manager, who, it should be noted, had been looking for an excuse to fire me for a few days.

“Now I want you to look at the end of this cable sir,” I said, showing him the female end of the extension cable he had purchased. “Notice how the holes are ENVAGINATED? That’s a FEEEEMALE, sir.”

I don’t know how the man reacted to that explanation because before I could register his expression my manager grabbed me and pushed me through the door of a nearby office, while yelling something about having another employee fix the problem. My manager followed me into the office and slammed the door behind him.

“That’s it!” he growled. “I can finally fire you with cause!”

‘With Cause’ was a phrase I heard a lot when being fired and I always found it hilarious. Of course the firing has a cause. Even illegal firings technically have a cause, like: “Well, I am a racist and he is black,” or: “I am a creep-ball and she will not sleep with me.”

I started smiling at the idea of a causeless firing—a firing born of pure chaos—and what that might be. Maybe a carpet beetle that lives in our store controls my manager’s thoughts and body and has decided to fire the first employee it sees. That seemed pretty causeless: “A solid case” as lawyers say, and I smiled wider.

“No,” I thought, “that still technically has a cause: the angry beetle.”

Oblivious to my inner monologue about the staffing practices of insects, my manager continued:

“You cannot talk to a customer that way! Not only was it condescending; not only did it have borderline, sexual connotations but, also...‘ENVAGINATED’? That’s not even a word!”

It should be added, he was doing violent air quotes as he said “envaginated.”

Internally, I knew my manager had every right to fire me and I was also beginning to think I might have made-up “envaginated,” but I also felt: I should leave this job the way I worked it- by arguing with my boss.

“Oh no,” I countered, “‘envaginated’ is most certainly a word. It’s used rather commonly in engineering documents.”

We began to argue for several minutes about the correctness of ‘envaginated’ and, somehow, I was able to convince him that, under Ohio employment laws, he could not fire me if we determined that ‘envaginated’ was a real word. Because in that case, the firing becomes “causeless” (which is another word I had just started using).

“Fine! Should be easy enough to prove!” he yelled, and picked up the office phone. “Warehouse? Warehouse, I want you to walk over to customer service, take fifty dollars out of petty cash, and go to Borders and buy me a dictionary! Yes. A fucking dictionary!”

Now, I knew for a fact that every time petty cash was used, a detailed expense report had to be completed and sent to corporate headquarters to justify the expenditure. Even as I was being fired, I always wondered how they would justify this; why a computer store in the mid-1990s needed to spend fifty dollars on a dictionary. And further, I knew those expense reports, physically, had very little room for someone to write in the explanation, and this situation was too complex to sum up concisely. And you certainly wouldn’t dare include the word “envaginated” in official documents. So I hoped that the only reason cited for laying out fifty bucks to buy a dictionary would be, simply: “FIRE EMPLOYEE!”

A few minutes later (there was a Borders in the same plaza as our store) an employee from the warehouse appeared with a dictionary and gave it to my manager. My manager handed the dictionary to me and, smiling like someone holding a straight flush, commanded: “OK, let’s see you find it.”

I opened the dictionary to “vagina.” My reasoning was: If this is a word, it will be a part of speech listed next to the body part. But no such luck; it wasn’t listed.

“It’s not there, is it Sean?” my manager asked.

“This dictionary may not have it,” I offered weakly, which is the only time that sentence has been stated outside of a game of Scrabble.

“It was the most expensive dictionary they had,” the employee who purchased it added. That’s going to look even better for the expense report, I thought.

“Hold on,” I interjected, “maybe it has become its own, stand-alone word? You know, due to how incredibly common it has become? Like ‘dishearten’?”

I flipped the pages, desperately, to “E” to see if “envaginated” was indeed its own word:
 

"env. envelope envapor (en vā’ pәr), v.t. to surround with vapor. enveil (en vāl’), v.t. to cover with a veil; place a veil upon."

It wasn’t there.

“I’ll walk you to the breakroom, Sean,” said my manager, trying to conclude the meeting. “You can collect any personal effects.”

“Wait!” I yelled, suddenly remembering just how terrible my instincts for spelling were. Maybe, I thought, just maybe—the word in question actually starts with an “I.” I re-opened the dictionary, flipped the pages to that section and finally there I saw, defined in big, bold print:
 

“invaginate (in vaj’a nāt), v. -nated, -nating, adj. —v.t. 1 to fold or draw (a hollow structure) back within itself; introvert; intussuscept. 2 = sheathe.”

I turned the dictionary around to face my manager, pointed to the word, and stood confidently, saying: “Well, if you’ll excuse me, looks like I have a sales record to go set.”

I left the room, my final remark all the more confident considering I did not work on the sales floor and had yet to make a sale.

I was fired two days later for being late.
 

"S  o you were fired for your vocabulary, Sean?” my dad confirmed again, with no small amount of doubt in his voice.

“Yeah. Well, I suppose, if we were to get into the”— here I winked, to indicate I was about to slip into begin fancy talk—“‘frippery’ of it, Dad, I think it was more that management found my vocabulary so annoying, they searched for any reason to fire me.”

“And what did they find, Sean?” my dad asked. My mom, who had been working in the living room, entered to hear this answer.

“I was three and a half hours late for work on Monday.”

My mom started laughing loudly. My dad shook his head, staring at the carpet. I heard him mumble, “Jesus, not one, not two...” and he trailed off.

“Sounds like you need a clock,” my mom chuckled as she headed back to the living room. “Or maybe,” she added, turning around, “as you two geniuses probably call it, ‘a chronometer.’”