This story originates from my first three years in the working world.I had just gotten married and worked in a small town appliance store selling televisions, stereos and white appliances. 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. The senior of the two bookkeepers had been with the store for over 35 years. She had been single all of her life, and was in her seventies. The other bookkeeper was at the other end of the age spectrum. She was barely twenty, and this was her first full time gig since leaving school. She did a lot of the routine work under the direction of the more senior staff member. The senior person dealt with paying invoices from our wholesalers, and in payment delinquencies from customers. She did most of the details of bookkeeping under the day to day direction of the older lady. To say there was friction between them was an understatement, but that might be another story to tell some day.
On Monday morning when we first arrived, we tended to BS about our weekend happenings. 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 salesperson was a woman in her 50's who mostly put on dinners for her family and extended family every Sunday. We managed to kibbutz around in the morning almost every day because the boss was usually a no-show until about 10:00 AM
That leaves the younger office girl Cathy. She was young, on the prowl, and her weekends were spent frequenting the local watering holes as she looked for guys. Her ultimate objective was to find a guy 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. She was fairly average in the looks department with a very slight weight issue. It was not bad, but she fussed over it all the time. All of the rest of the staff had a different opinion though. We all felt her problem was her attitude. The following story best illustrates this.
The day after one particular weekend, Cathy was once again discussing her weekend. As usual, she was out with her usual crowd of girlfriends. She was whining that her Saturday evening was a bust because she did not get to dance at all. She then told us about this guy who had come up to their table just as they walked in and asked one of her girlfriends to dance. She turned him 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 then laughed at how stupid he was to be so persistent. I was curious why she thought it was stupid so I asked her.
She said that once one of the girls at her table said no, then all the other girls just had to say no. Otherwise they would look desperate. Perplexed by this attitude, I asked her to elaborate more. Well she said, when he went around to the other tables, all the girls there had to turn him down too, even if they thought he was cute. When I asked why, she said that they would have been worried about looking needy by picking up someone that someone else had turned down.
In a desperate attempt at that point in my life to try to fathom the meanderings of the female mind, I asked a couple of other 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. Then I asked why it was the first girl had turned him down. She said that they had just gotten there, and that that she did not feel like dancing yet. So I asked Cathy that if she had been asked first, would she had said yes. She said that she had wanted him to ask her for weeks, so of course she would have said yes. My eyes were now crossing trying to follow this distorted logic.
So I summarized my understanding up to that point in time. 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. So when he asked you to dance and you turned him down, the result was that you ended up having a crappy evening. She said that sometimes stuff like that happens.
Being young and foolish and certain that I could solve anything, I decided that I could convince her that her reasoning was faulty, so I persisted. So I asked her to put herself in the place of the guy. I said if you were a guy, who at the table would you have approached to dance first? She said that likely she would have asked the same person that he did. She did not have as good a personality as she (Cathy) did, but that the other girl was cuter. So I asked if she had ever actually talked to the guy other than to turn him down, and she said no. So I said that she had never given him the opportunity to talk to her because she had refused to dance with him. How was he supposed to know that she had a better personality? She gave me a look that told me that she now classified my as mentally challenged. She said, “I already told you that I couldn't! Weren't you listening”? I gave up at that point.
A couple of weeks later, I noticed that Cathy was not her usual perky self. I asked her what the problem was. She said that the guy that she had turned down to dance had shown up with a new girlfriend, and said the the girl was not even pretty. I told her it was too bad that she had flubbed her opportunity to show him what a nice person she was. So again, she looked at me like I had the IQ of a slug and said, “I already told you that it was impossible for me to say yes to him that night!” About a year later, Cathy was moping around the office for a couple of months. One of her girlfriends told me that they guy she really liked had married that girl. She still had not said boo to the guy. The only thing that she had ever said to him was to refuse to dance with him.
I left there shortly afterwards to take on a better job elsewhere in the same town. I stayed on long enough to train my replacement, and would run into him from time to time. He stayed on a decade before leaving as well. When he left, Cathy was still working at the store, still all alone, and still searching the bars for Mr. Right.
Looks like she never did change!
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