(Note: This story was originally told on Reddit)
I once worked front desk at a public pool.
It was horrible, but one interaction stands out, both for how malicious my compliance was and for the fallout. Our swim team had just launched and parents came to sign their kids up for every single thing they could because it meant after school activities and freedom! Yay!
My responsibility was The Form. First, I had to help design The Form, because the design the city gave us (made by a woman who was making more than minimum wage as a pool desk caddy) was not enough for my boss and my dumb ass let her know I could make MS Word sit up and do tricks for e-cookies. Once The Form was approved (and by then I was taking proofs home to burn as catharsis) my job was to make sure that every single parent had signed The Form and paid their fee.
Enter Daddy T. His daughter was on swim team, and he had this charismatic grin and confident way of speaking that immediately put my alarm bells into “Danger, Will Robinson". He was a little…too smiley. A little too happy. And vaguely familiar. There was something kind of off about him. I wasn't sure what it was, but it made me want to be as far under his radar as possible.
Unfortunately, while his kid was signed up for swim team, he still needed to sign The Form and pay for her entry. Which meant I needed to interact with him.
Most females, and not too few males, know that gazelle-on-the-veldt feeling. Something is off. Something had the hair on the back of your neck standing on end. You don't know what it is, and the rules of social interaction demand you keep your mouth shut and play nice.
The guy spends a few minutes of charismatic smiles (I had never seen teeth like that outside of channel ten news presenters) acting like he's having trouble reading The Form. I designed The Form over the course of multiple painful weeks and know you would have to be severely brain damaged to have issues understanding it. My boss had me dumb it down to the point that a kindergarten student could know where to scribble a name approximation. And this guy is well spoken and clean cut, and he's got the sharpest (and most familiar!) gaze I’ve ever seen. I cannot think of any reason for him to be this obtuse honestly. And I begin to suspect he is hitting on me. Which for multiple reasons has me creeped out by several orders of magnitude. I just want this guy to go away.
Finally, after agonizing minutes of him struggling with a form that a two year old could sign, he hands it back and says (still with that same confident, charismatic smile) “Read it to me.”
I was at a low point in my life. I hated every single thing about my life. I had untreated PTSD and the thought of anyone hitting on me made me want to go scrub a layer of skin off. The realization that this guy had me pinned to a desk I could not leave until he signed The Form made me want to punch him. But I needed this job, and my boss would grind me into flour and turn me into concession stand specials if I even pretended to stand up for myself. So instead, I complied. I shifted into Happy Customer Service Mode and I read him that goddamn Form. I summarized legalese. I dumbed things down from Kindergarten to PreSchool. I did it all with the sweetest smile I could muster and tried to be about as asexual as the desktop computer right next to the counter window. I made it a point to be The Most Cheerfully Helpful Person, and hoped that somehow this would translate to go the fuck away.
And it worked. He signed. He left. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Until next week, when The Form had to be supplemented by The Sign In Sheet and the whole fucking song and dance repeated itself. He asked me to read him the goddamn sign-in sheet. And I did. With a smile. That couldn’t have been more forced if he had a gun to my head. At this point I was heaping lit coals on his head and practicing my “obtuse as fuck" face. I might be a captive audience but I would be damned before I let him know he got to me. I maliciously treated him like any other customer. I hated to see him arrive, and when he left I cheered
And this went on for weeks, because every session the boss would need a new form signed, and every session that guy asked me to read it to him, and I managed it by channeling my inner robot. I even began highlighting his daughter's name—what kind of shit dad “forgets" his daughter's name—and our interactions became a game. Him trying to get to me. Me, refusing to be got. It almost felt like chess.
Then it came time to distribute the Swim Team Gear, and that brought a whole new set of forms. Which meant That Guy asked me to read him every single one of them.
And just when I’m contemplating leaping out the nearest window while doing s full body Silkwood decontam, he suddenly meets my eyes and this layer of pretense I hadn't ever noticed drops away. He has tears, literal tears, in his eyes. And he says “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much."
See, the entire time I had been maliciously complying with him, by being the best reader ever? I'd been struck by how familiar he looked. But I didn't ever really watch the news. I just sat and read books while my parents watched it instead. Which is why I didn't recognize our local weatherman when he began bringing his daughter to swim practice.
It's also why I didn't know why he had recently retired. He'd been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, you see. And they'd just finished a round of surgery and chemo to save his life that they weren't sure would actually work. His odds sucked. It really had been all over the news. They even gave him a really nice, heartbreaking sound off that I never watched because of my own depression and isolation. I found it on YouTube later. It's the kind of thing all of us would pray someone do in out memory.
He thanked me, because ever since his surgery, his ability to function had been compromised. He could mask most of the damage with his charisma and training, and usually could fake-it-till-you-make-it with the best of them, but he'd lost a lot of his capacity to read. It was a struggle he’d obviously never faced before and it frustrated him that after all his college education and decades being the face of the local weather, he suddenly couldn't even read a basic form for his daughter’s swim team. And he was so thankful (he was crying) that I was taking so much time out of my day to help him. And not just to help him, but to be so un-patronizing. I had treated him like he was normal. He said that I made him feel sort of…whole, again. He made every effort to make it clear: he was genuinely, sincerely grateful for how helpful I had been.
And I am suddenly reviewing every insult I thought about him. Every time I questioned his mental capacity or quality as a parent. He was so low that what I meant as a mockery and a punishment was, to him, a gift. I made him feel normal.
There aren't words for that kind of shame. I thought it was a game. I really did.
People still talk about how he touched lives. I know he touched mine.
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