GETTING MORE TALE #555: How to Be Annoying
Nobody really liked working with Dandy. What Dandy did was decide who he liked and who he didn’t. If he liked you, he wouldn’t annoy you repeatedly. If he didn’t like you, then he just didn’t care – he’d do whatever he wanted, the more annoying the better. One or two higher ranked people never saw his annoying side. For the rest of us, he’d act like an idiot on a dime.
One of his most annoying habits was dancing at work. He’d put on one of his favourite bands – the Dandy Warhols, or the Toilet Boys – and dance around the store. And when he danced, his white belly would pop out from his too-tight black T-shirt – not a pretty sight. I’ll admit I’m not the most svelte of specimens but I keep my white belly under ample amounts of shirt! I’ll never forget the sight of him belly dancing when the Toilet Boys came on.
He also liked to embarrass other people as much as possible. For example, when Joe Strummer died. Customers were jumping on the Clash bandwagon, but I really didn’t know anything about the band. I knew the hits from having heard them in the store, and there were songs that I like. I know one of the drummers (Terry Chimes) was briefly in Black Sabbath. But I knew next to nothing else about the band members. Due to his name (Strummer) I assumed Joe was the guitar player. To this day I only own one Clash album (London Calling). It just wasn’t my background. My youth was a heady mix of British and North American classic rock and metal, and I never even bought a punk rock album until the mid-90s (Never Mind the Bollocks was my first). Once Dandy realized I didn’t know who Joe Strummer’s was, he made sure to tell everybody. Loudly.
“Hey get this! We were listening to the Clash – Mike thinks Joe Strummer is the guitar player! HAH HAH HAH! He doesn’t even know! HAH HAH HAH!”
But then the next day he would be nice as pie to me, and picking on somebody else. Usually the infamous Spoogecakes.
Spoogecakes and Dandy weren’t exactly two of a kind. She liked Lord of the Rings, Finger 11 and the Showboat soundtrack (we’ll talk about that one another day). He liked drugs, makeup, and whatever was on-trend. The only thing they had in common was annoying me. Like for example, one time Spoogecakes hid my hat somewhere in the store and thought it was freaking hilarious. I found out later on that she had a crush on me and this was an attention-getting game. Kind of like something you’d do in grade school, annoying the girl you like for attention because you didn’t know what else to do.
It was Dandy who coined her original nickname: the Angry Walrus. His opinion was that she had that kind of face, and always seemed angry. (She did definitely always seem angry.) Apparently the name stuck immediately. It was like a freight train that could not be stopped and I was the last one to hear about it, because I was the manager and nobody wanted to tell me.
Dandy: “Damn, you have me scheduled to work with the Angry Walrus tonight. That sucks.”
Me: “Who the fuck is the ‘Angry Walrus’?”
I was so frustrated with both of them that I really didn’t even give a fuck anymore. Thankfully I was soon transferred over to another location, and I never had to work with either again. Thank fuck!