This story originates from my first three years in the working 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 staff was quite small, only five people on the upstairs floor and two in the service shop downstairs. The service people seldom interacted with staff socially. There was the boss of course, another salesperson besides me, and two bookkeepers in the back office. 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, Cathy, was barely twenty. This was her first full time job. (She did a lot of the routine work under the direction of the more senior staff member. She did most of the routine work under the direction of the older lady. 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. They had a severe personality clash between them, but most of the time that did not affect their work. The younger girl just loved to catch the older ladies mistakes, and often I heard all about the latest fiasco over lunch.
On Monday morning when we first arrived, we tended to BS about our weekend happenings. Being recently married had put a serious cash crunch on my entry level wages, so all we could afford to do was hang out with our friends playing cards or just talking. I was told the old lady spent most of her Saturday night and Sunday after church drinking scotch. The other sales associate was a woman around 55 years old who spent most of her weekend cooking for her family and extended family. We managed to kibbutz around in the morning almost every day because the boss was usually a no-show until about 10:00 AM
The last person on staff was the junior bookkeeper Cathy. She was young, but looking for a husband. Her methodology was to frequent the local bars every weekend with her girl pack looking to see if she could have fun, and ultimately snag herself a husband. Because all of the rest of us could only talk about the same stuff we talked about last week, invariably, the conversation on Monday tended to center on Cathy's latest exploits. She had a way of dramatizing the mundane, so if nothing else, her stories were more interesting than – 'I cooked dinner for my family'. 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. From my point of view, her attitude was what was hindering her most. The following story best illustrates this.
One particular Monday, Cathy was talking about her Saturday night. 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 mentioned that this guy had come up to their table just as they got there, and had asked one of her friends to dance and was turned down. He then proceeded to ask each of the other girls, who all turned him down. 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 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 after being turned down by all the women at our table, he then proceeded to ask other women at other tables, and they of course had to turn him down too. When I inquired why, she said that all the other girls would not want to look second best to the ones who had already refused him. So they had to refuse him too. Otherwise, they would have pretty much admitted to being second best to the other women in the room.
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 her what was wrong with him. Did he look like an ape 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 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 Cathy if the guy would have asked her first, would she have danced with him. She said yes because she had been hoping that he would have asked her for weeks. My eyes were now crossing trying to follow this distorted logic.
So I summarized my understanding up to that point in time. I said that you knew your girlfriend had turned him down just because she was tired, and that you had wanted him to ask you to dance for weeks. She said that was right. But he did ask you and you turned him down, and then had a crappy Saturday night because nobody else asked you to dance. She said yes, thats just the way it goes sometimes.
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 to think like a guy for a bit and tell me which of the people she would have approached first if she was a guy. She said that she supposed she would have approached the same girl that he did, because she was cuter, even though her personality was not as good as hers (Cathy's). So I asked if she had ever talked to the guy, and she indicated that she had not. So I asked her how was it that he would know she had a better personality if he she had never given him the opportunity to talk to her when he asked her to dance? She looked at me like I was mentally deficient or something. “Weren't you listening to me? I already told you why I could not dance with him!”, she said. At that point I dropped the conversation. It was clearly pointless.
A few weeks later, Cathy was moping around on Monday. I talked to her a bit and got her to open up as to 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 suggested that it was a shame that she had screwed up her chance to be with him. 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 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. When he left, Cathy was still working at the store, still all alone, and still searching the bars for Mr. Right.
I guess she never did learn!
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