Julie

“Hi, My name is Emily Whalen and I’d like to buy 4 tickets to tonight’s hockey game”

“Hold please,” replied a nondescript male voice.

Friends were visiting from Florida and in an attempt to show them some Yankee wintertime hospitality, I wanted to take them to sit on hard seats in an indoor arena where it would be colder inside than outside in order to watch a sport that they neither understood nor cared about.  

When I heard the voice on the other end of the line again, it sounded different:  husky and a little bit out of breath.  It was as if one of the players had been practicing out on the ice and had rushed off to answer my call when he heard the phone ring.   

“Hi Julie, this is Troy and I’ll be your customer service representative today.  Julie, I am really glad you called because I have some special offers that I want to tell you about.  I wouldn’t call them ‘secret’, but it’s fair to say that they aren’t advertised to the general public.”

I had just an instant to decide how to proceed, because, as previously stated, Julie is not my name.  I could correct him and possibly lose access to the special deals he had mentioned or just be cool and maybe get the fourteen dollar tickets for eleven or even ten dollars each.  

“OK, Troy.  Tell me about these ‘special offers.’”  Suddenly my voice was huskier too and my speech had slowed like I was auditioning for a part in Gone with the Wind or trying to do the voices in an American Girl book.    

“Julie, let me introduce you to one of my favorite products that we offer:  Flex Packs.  Do you know what a Flex Pack is, Julie?”

Before I go on, I feel that it is important to explain that I pride myself in my ability to make independent consumer decisions.  If I don’t feel like cookies, I will flat out turn down the cutest pigtailed beret-wearing girl scout.  Sometimes I even only buy one item in a buy-one-get-one-free situation.    So I was confident in my ability to resist the pitches of this hunky sounding hockey player-slash-salesman calling me by the wrong name, even if he was throwing around terms like ‘secret’ and ‘flex pack.’ The charade might be tempting and fun, but I knew that in the end, I would buy just four tickets for the game that would begin in just a few hours.   

“Julie…”

But suddenly I found myself trying on this new identity.  Maybe Emily wouldn’t buy a flex pack but who knew what kind of consumer behavior Julie might practice.  

“...Flex Packs are our most flexible and fun ticket packages.  With a Silver Level Flex Pack, you get thirteen ticket vouchers that can be redeemed for tickets to any regular season game, including Mullet Night, Pink Ice Night and Bobblehead Giveaway night!”

“Bobblehead Giveaway?” He must have sensed a weakening in my resolve.

“Yes Julie, the first 1,500 fans receive a free bobblehead of our Mascot.  And Julie, if you think the Silver Flex Pack sounds good, let me tell you about the Gold Level Flex Pack.”

Troy continued, talking all about premium seating, the popular chuck-a-puck promotion and the t-shirt cannon, saying the name Julie over and over, but I was too busy looking for my credit card which I carried loose in my backpacked, twisted among ipod headphones, rubber bands and granola bar wrappers.  I was sure that Julie would carry her card neatly in a thick but organized leather wallet, so I tried not to reveal how flustered I was after finally finding my card inside a dirty gym sock.  

“I’ll take the Gold Level Package, Troy.”  

I scraped a yogurt raisin off the first four digits of the card with my fingernail and listened as Troy congratulated me, like I had just selected a particularly expensive bottle of wine.   “Julie, you have made a great choice and it is going to be a great season,” he gushed.  “Now, Julie, if you are paying with a credit card today, I’ll just need your full name and your sixteen-digit card number.”

And that was it the end of my imaginary little narrative.  I was no longer Julie who purchased flex-packs on a whim after being sweet talked by Troy.  I was still just myself, and I still only wanted four tickets.  

“Actually, Troy, my name is Emily, and I changed my mind about the flex pack.”

“What?  I’m sorry.”

Sorry about the name or sorry about the flex pack, I wondered.  The tone of the conversation had changed and I felt a little bit hollow inside because of it.  In a pitiful attempt to simultaneously remain true to myself and to experience life as Julie, I ended up purchasing a silver level flex pack and giving away the unused tickets at the end of the season.  

In the end, I will probably never buy hockey tickets again.  Parking was terrible and the games weren’t very exciting.  But I occasionally look back with fondness on the moment that I was Julie, and I was impulsively purchasing an irresponsibly large number of tickets.  

Thanks, Troy.

Dear B.J. Novak

Dear B.J. Novak,

I am writing to you to share an idea that I had for an essay.  I was going to write it myself, but frankly, I just don’t have time.  I mean to be honest, I don’t even really have time to be writing you this letter, but this idea has just been burning like an ember in my mind and I was going to share it with David Sedaris, but to be honest, I think you need it more.  Plus, you don’t have a day job so while I spend my days going to work and the grocery store and then trying to fit in the post office or the gym, you probably sit in a little office that has one of those slanted ceilings that you have to tilt your head just to get to your desk (I am shorter than you so I wouldn’t have to duck) and peck your ideas out on some vintage typewriter (I am very busy so I touch type).  Periodically, you probably lean back in your chair, prop your feet on your desk and sigh a cliche to your cat: ‘This is the life, Boots!’ or ‘It’s just you and me, Boots!’  Since you don’t have to spend your time googling ‘how to impress your boss’ or ‘what’s a good interest rate on a retirement account’ you must really be able to flesh out an idea.  In fact you probably have four or five bad ideas for every good idea.  I wish that I had that luxury.  I don’t even have time to dig into the one really good idea that I do have (mentioned above), let alone time to waste on letting bad ideas develop in the first place.  If you can picture it, my mind is like one of those whack-a-mole games like you see at a carnival, and whenever I feel a bad idea welling up, like buying a robotic vacuum cleaner or adopting a pit bull, I just whack it down before it reaches my mouth (or my computer, if I am touch typing).  

So my idea for an essay is that you should write about when books first became popular and write about how everyone was always looking down at their books instead of looking up at the people, places and things around them.  The joke is that the whole time you will actually be talking about cell phones, not books.  So in the essay, you can write about how people kept crashing horses into each other because they were reading their books or about how birth rates dropped as books became more readily available (make sure not to mention improvements in maternal health care, increased access to birth control or vaccines).  Or you could write about people standing around the pump handle at the village well all talking about a new bestseller.  But what you really are talking about is texting and driving, people not having sex because they are too busy with their phones or how everyone at work is always talking about these viral youtube videos. (which you probably don’t know from experience, but trust me, it happens).  

If I was writing the essay, which I am not (see 1st paragraph) I might include a few small vignettes like this one:

As her father reached for another helping of potatoes, Madyson glanced down at the book in her lap.  As she did, she caught a warning glance from her mother, who had always lived on the fine line between friend and informant.  Her mother gestured with her eyebrows towards her father who had recently grown exasperated with his daughter’s constant reading.  The look said ‘Madyson, for the love of god, put that book away before your father breathes the breath of a thousand dragons at your face!’  In a perfect demonstration of typical teenage behavior, Madyson stared blankly at her mother with her mouth half open for a half a second before refocusing on the book in her lap.  Picking up on the weird vibe, her father’s gaze slowly travelled from his plate across the table to her mothers face and then rotated clockwise until it landed on the downturned head of his teenage daughter.  His breaths grew shallow as he prepared to spew tired rhetoric about ‘I don’t care if other teenagers read at the table, this is my house’ and ‘I WILL take that G.D.  book right out of your sparkly nail polished little hands and drop it down the toilet if it doesn’t disappear from the table NOW and FOREVER!!’

Now here comes the good part of this essay.  What you can do at the end of it is point out that although people used to be obsessed with books, the truth is that they barely even read them anymore.  And so while everyone is so obsessed with their phones and snapchat and Candy Crush (I only know of these from NPR references that I hear in my car on my way to work, see paragraph 1) probably in the future, they will barely even use them because there will be something better and newer and more fun.  It’s tough to imagine but maybe in the future, Verizon or AT&T will go the way of Borders, and if you take this idea, you can say that YOU SAW IT COMING.  It will be difficult to make this point without offending 1) people who love books and 2) people who love phones, but frankly, after reading your last book (to be honest, I mainly stuck to the pieces that were three pages or less) I am not sure that you care about catering to anyone’s delicate sensibilities.  

I would like to remain anonymous as I don’t have time for a detailed and lengthy correspondence with you.  If you can’t figure it out from the details above, then I guess I was wrong about you after all.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

P.S.  Why the initials?  Just use your regular name like everyone else.