Proofreading

This is a completely ridiculous thing to write about as an update--especially since it means that I probably won’t make a Hamline drawing tonight--but the main thing going on right now is The Karate Kid II.

Here’s how this came to be that way:

My proofreading team--there are eight of us--gently hazes new people, and gives them nicknames. We haven’t gotten a new person in a couple of months, but the last new guy was given the unfortunate nickname “Steve” before most of us even met him, because I didn’t want us to have two guys named John. So, I said “when the new guy gets here, let’s all call him Steve”, and like almost all of my cruel nicknames, it stuck. And it stuck hard, especially after Erich printed up a desk-identifying name tag that said “Steve” on it.

After about a month, Steve told someone (my immediate supervisor, I assume) that he didn’t like the name “Steve”, and that we should just call him by his last name. We do. To his face. Inside, we all think “Steve” when we see him. In the real world, we call him by his last name when he’s around.

(I don’t know if it’s like this for other people, but it feels really creepy for me to call other people John. This problem is exacerbated by my name being the most common name in the English language, but calling other people my own name really creeps me out.

I have fantasized many times about moving to a new town and going by my middle name, but ultimately I decided that it would feel like lying--which I hate--and that I’d be found out sooner or later. Still, it would be cool to move somewhere and become “Charles”.)

The last guy hired before Steve is someone who is only sort of starting to shake off the nickname “Cellphone”, another of my cruel monikers.

Cellphone responds as quickly to “Cellphone” as he does to his own name. He’s actually a friend of mine, as are all of the people on our team, including my “supervisor”. I’ve had most of them over to my apartment for drinks. Cellphone doesn’t like his nickname, but I think he understands that he can’t shake it. Many months ago, Erich and I framed pictures of cellphones, starkly cut out of brochures and taped onto ColorAid, and put them all over his desk. They’re still there.

So, I started working on the same day as this other guy who--for some reason--was wearing a necktie. I assumed that he was wearing it to impress someone, since no one else at work wears a necktie. My boss actually told him on the first day that he didn’t have to wear that tie. But he said:

“I bought these clothes for work, so I’m gonna wear ‘em.”

And he kept wearing the tie! No one else at work wears a tie, and this hick jackass kept wearing the fucking thing! Would you wear a tie if you didn’t have to? Putting the thing on is like wearing five-holed underwear. No one in their right mind would wear a tie if they didn’t think they had to. Still, he kept wearing it.

So, I nicknamed him “Necktie”.

And that stuck too, and he hated it, so we all call him that behind his back.

There are more stories about Necktie, but I will save them for later. Or, I can sum it up by simply saying that Necktie was the shittiest proofreader ever, and then he applied for a job in another department and got it because he was--get this--really friendly with Human Resources. Barf, right?

Anyway, because we lost Necktie, there’s an open spot on our proofreading team, and we’ve been trying to figure out how to haze the potential new person. We passed around a notebook on which everyone wrote ideas about how to mystify the new proofreader we’re going to get.

The best idea of all was Erich’s, that we should all be really touchy-feely. We should put our hands on people’s shoulders when asking them questions, we should do “trust falls”, stuff like that.

The boss vetoed it--though she thought is was really funny--because it could have been construed as sexual harassment, even though we’d never planned on touching the new person.

So I had the idea that we should all pretend that we were really into the same incredibly lame movie. I suggested “The Karate Kid II” as an example. We will have many framed pictures of Ralph Macchio on our desks, and we’ll get together in the middle of the room many times a day to discuss plot elements of “The Karate Kid II”. I suggested that we could claim that the whole team had sort of hated each other before we had this night where we all got together for dinner and watched “The Karate Kid II”, and it had changed us, had made us closer as a team. Also, we’re going to assert parallels between “The Karate Kid II” and “The Empire Strikes Back”.

We had our first real “Karate Kid II” moment the other day, because my boss had googled “Ralph Macchio” the night before, and asserted--first thing in the morning--that his last name was pronounced “makio”. This led to a twenty minute argument among five people. In the end, we decided that “makio” is probably the correct pronunciation, and that his agent told him to pronounce it “mahtchio” because it has the word “macho” in it. We also decided that using the “makio” would make it seem--to the new person--that we had some kind of secret inside knowledge.

We’re having a screening of “The Karate Kid II” on Friday night, so that we can start getting acquainted with it.

We’ve also started a fund to by the team a copy of “The Karate Kid II” so that we can pass it around to make sure that everyone sees it.

By the way, my work-nickname is “Jerk”, but I requested it.