Denied!

Last week my wife and I were up at the gym in our building (actually, it's in the building next to us, which we share a lobby, maintenance staff, door staff, etc. with, but I shouldn't always feel the need to over-explain every little detai....d'oh!), which is a great little perk that came with our apartment. It is a small gym with about two step machines, a couple of bikes, a weight-lifting four station contraption (no idea what it would be called), and four treadmills. And they all face a window on the 38th floor looking north from the lower part of the Upper East Side. It's a pretty decent place to work out, especially since it's free.

Now the four treadmills they have there are two pairs of competing brands. They are slightly different, the display screens don't look alike, the cup holders are different sizes and one kind has longer side bars than the other. But they're treadmills. You hit start, it moves, you walk or run. They seem to both be able to go the same speed and you can change the incline on all of them. You can run them in manual or in one of many pre-programed modes that will set the speed and incline for you. They both are capable of checking your heart rate by grabbing on the bars with both hands.

But for some reason the people who work out there have favorites. Now, I won't say that I don't have a preference when I go up there. I certainly have a first choice when I walk in to the room. But if the machines with the bigger cup holders and longer bars are taken, I just use one of the other ones. Some others, though, really want their favorite machine and will wait for it. We've seen it happen before, with this guy who will slowly pedal one of the bikes nearby until my wife and I get done with the ones he's waiting for. Ha almost knocked my wife over one time running on to the machine as she was getting off. A little obsessive I thought.

So anyway, last week right after we had gotten on to the two treadmills and started walking, an older couple walked in the room. They looked at us with some sort of shocked confusion and stood there for a minute. Then the woman came up and asked us how much longer we would be, which I thought was a kind of rude thing to do considering there were no other people in the gym at the moment, so every other machine in the place was empty including the other two treadmills. After we told her we just started and that we would probably be another half hour or so, she conferred with her husband and they walked out of the gym.

Now this just doesn't make any sense to me. I can't get my favorite machine so I just won't exercise? What, they would walk in to a movie and if their two favorite seats are taken they just say "fuck it" and don't watch the movie? People are weird. They eventually came back and waited around for us to be done.

I just loved it. I really love denying people of things they want. It makes me happy.

I often have to do temp work in my life, since no one is giving me a million dollars for my brilliant writing or my theatre directing. Mostly I do reception work because I have no office skills whatsoever and it's usually a job that gives you enough time to do things like write a blog. I also love it because there are many opportunities to deny people what they want. So many sales people call companies trying to get their business, and nobody ever wants to talk to them. So as a receptionist, one gets to tell them no all the time.

Can I speak with the person in charge of I.T? Not if you don't know their name you can't.
What's so and so's direct line? I can't tell you that.
Can you give me the email for the head of HR? Hell no!
Who purchases your office supplies? I could tell you that, but I won't.

It happens like that all day long. And if they get bitchy with me I can just hang up. It really is a beautiful situation. You're like a gatekeeper. And you can make people be nice to you if they want to get through.

My favorite thing to do is fuck with the copy machine scam people. If you haven't heard of this, here is a quick run-down. Somebody calls the office and says they are from "your copier company" (sometimes even say a name) and need to get the copier serial number. What supposedly happens if you give them this number is that a bunch of copy supplies will get shipped to the company and they will claim that of course you must have ordered it because you gave us the model number of your machine so we could send you the right supplies.

I'm not sure exactly what kind of moron this scam works on, but it must work a decent amount of times because those calls keep coming at just about every company I've ever been a temp receptionist.

Lots of receptionists will keep it polite and say something like, "I'm sorry I can't give that information out" or some other such thing. I usually hang up on them. A couple of times I've just come out and asked the person how often this scam works. I've never gotten an answer, they'll just hang up after I ask.

When I'm in a real good mood though, I say, "Sure, hold on one sec."

Then I put them on hold. And leave them there.

It's so much fun to see how long they'll actually wait. And I just love the thought of some guy sitting on the phone thinking he's found a sucker to give him the info he needs to pull a con job and then slowly realizing he's been duped himself.

One time a guy actually called back and told me that I left him on hold and that he still needed that number. I said, "Oh, sorry about that, let me get that for you."

Then I put him back on hold.