Thoughtless Thinking!

This is a story from when I had just started in the work world.I was working in a small town store that sold stereos, television sets, pianos, organs, and appliances. I had been married quite recently and could not afford to do much after work. The store only had a few people working there. The sales staff consisted of myself, my boss, and an experienced sales lady. The other two staff were primarily bookkeepers, but they were involved in taking cash as well as customer credit applications. One of the bookkeepers was in her 70's. She was an aged spinster and the boss kept her employed for sentimental reasons. She had been with the store for 35 years after all. The other bookkeeper was a young girl in her early twenties. She did most of the details of bookkeeping under the day to day direction of the older lady. They were like oil and water most of the time, so the work environment in that part of the store was a bit acerbic at times.

Back then, stores were closed on Sundays. Every Monday morning we would tend to shoot the breeze about what we had done on Saturday Night and Sunday.  With the tight finances of being married recently, my wife and I usually just did very inexpensive things like play cards at friends houses. The old lady apparently had a taste for scotch, or at least that is what I had been told. She usually just went to church on Sundays, and hung around drinking 'tea' with her friends. The other sales associate was a woman around 55 years old who spent most of her weekend cooking for her family and extended family. The boss seldom showed up before 10:00 AM which is why we got to BS over coffee before 10:00 every day.

Now Cathy, the junior accounting clerk, was in a class of her own. She spent nearly every weekend frequenting the local pubs with her girlfriends. They would move from club to club in a pack looking for fun. Ultimately, they were all looking for the man of their dreams to marry. Defacto, most of our Monday morning chats ended up centered on Cathy's latest life drama. She could make the most common occurrences sound like a major stage production. Likely she would have been better served in the movie industry. Cathy would never win a beauty contest, but she would never come in dead last either. She was a bit heavier that some of her friends but not so much that you would even remark on it. Unfortunately she fixated on her slight weight issue as being the bane of her existence and why she was not having any luck landing her prince charming. All of the rest of the staff had a different opinion though. We all felt her problem was her attitude. This is best typified by the following story.

One particular Monday, Cathy was talking about her Saturday night. As usual she had been out with her pack of girls. She complained that she never got to dance a single dance on Saturday night, and that the whole evening was a bust. She then proceeded to mention about a guy who had come up to their table just as they were sitting down and asked one of her crowd to dance, but was turned down. He asked each of the other girls at the table, and they all turned him down too, including Cathy. Over the next hour, she had watched him ask other girls in the club, who all turned him down, so he left. She shook her head and said that she couldn't believe how stupid he had been to do that.  I asked her why it was stupid, because from my point of view it looked like he just wanted to dance.

She said that once one of the girls at her table had turned him down, it was pointless to ask the others because there is no way they could say yes to him. If they had, it would be admitting to the other girls that they were not as good as they were. Since she had my curiosity piqued, I asked her for more of an explanation.  She said that once he had been turned down by her entire table, he might as well have walked out. No other girl in the club would have said yes at that point. When I asked why, she said that it would have made them seem needy. Like they would just dance with anybody else's leavings.

In an effort to truly understand what to me was a twisted point of view, I asked her some more questions. I asked him if he was someone that women would not want to be caught dead with because he had warts on his face or something. She said that he was actually quite good looking, and she had been hoping for weeks that he would ask her to dance. So I asked if she knew why the first girl had turned him down. She said it was just because they did not even have a chance to take of their coats yet or order drinks or anything. So I asked her if the guy would have asked her (Cathy) first would she have danced with him. She said of course she would have.  My eyes were now crossing trying to follow this distorted logic.

At this juncture, I summarized my understanding to make sure I had not missed anything. I said, you knew that your friend had turned him down not because she was not interested, but because she was tired. She said that was right. I suggested that she ended up having a crappy evening because she had turned down the one guy who asked her to dance with him. She said, yes, sometimes you can be unlucky.

By now, I was feeling that I should show her the errors of her ways, so I asked a few more questions. I asked her that if she was a guy, who at the table would she have asked to dance first. She said she would have asked the girl that he asked first because she was cuter. But then she proceeded to say that the cuter girl did not have as good a personality as she did. So I asked if she had ever actually talked to the guy other than to turn him down, and she said no. So I asked her how was he ever to know that she had a better personality if she did not talk to him when she had the opportunity. She looked at me like I had the thinking prowess of a great ape. She said, “I already told you that I couldn't! Weren't you listening”? I gave up at that point.

A week or two later, I noticed that Cathy was moping around for a couple of days. So I cajoled her into telling me what her problem was. She said that the guy she really liked had shown up with a new girlfriend on his arm, and they danced all night. She said that the girl was not that good looking, and was not even a good dancer. I told her it was too bad that she had flubbed her opportunity to show him what a nice person she was. Once again, she looked at me like I was some neanderthal from the ice age. “I told you I could not say yes to him. How many times do I have to repeat myself!”, she said.   A year or so later, the guy married the girl, and Cathy was beside herself. She was months getting over it. She never had actually talked to the guy.

I did not stay at that store much longer. I found a much better paying job with a more stable future elsewhere in the city. I trained the guy who replaced me and we became passing friends. He stayed on for ten years. At the time he left, Cathy had been promoted to senior bookkeeper after the older lady died. She was, however, still unmarried with no steady boyfriend. She was still prowling the bars with her friends on the weekend. She still had not found her prince charming.

I guess she never changed!


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