Your Petty Life-Threatening Personal Anecdotes are Useless Here
April 11, 2001
It’s now the third week of my new job, and I feel like I’m gradually beginning to get to know everyone. At least I’ve figured out if I can make jokes about drugs, knowing that I will receive a laugh in response instead of suspicious, awkward silence.
There’s one girl in particular who’s made me feel really welcome: Leah. For some reason we just get along really well - we have pretty similar tastes in music (not many people can listen to both Something For Kate and Rammstein in one sitting); if she drives me home I always end up paying for the toll when we pull up to the Sydney Harbour Bridge tollbooth and she realises she doesn’t have any change (she does frantically bark at me to burrow through her handbag for coins, but women’s handbags are territory I don’t tread); and we constantly insult each other with such titles as ‘fuckface’. Despite all this - we get along famously.
So when Leah was asked by our office manager to locate 50 Easter eggs on her lunch break, she asked me if I wanted to come along. Sure, I said. It’s not often you get paid to buy chocolate.
Our mission was to buy 50 eggs as cheap as possible, and they had to be in the corporate colours of our company’s logo (we were going to package the eggs and send them to some of our clients). After experiencing Leah’s interesting interpretation of road rules regarding roundabouts, we sped into an underground carpark near a large shopping centre.
It was the variety of carpark where you find yourself involuntarily breathing in as you traverse some of the tighter turns. As I was preoccupied trying to recall which decade it was when the red-bricks-and-concrete variety of architecture was popular, I took little notice of our parking location. Leah quickly pulled into an available parking space, and we scuttled across the concrete monolith to the elevators.
Blinking in the bright light as we disembarked onto the sidewalk, it wasn’t difficult to locate the local Westfield Shoppingtown. This is a chain of shopping centres in Australia, so named due to the fact that they actually do take up the space of a small town, and usually require their own postcode.
Tentatively stepping into the building, I squinted and searched for signs of any other shoppers. I gazed upwards towards the higher floors, following a set of three-story tall palm trees for any sign of life, but all I could spot was a set of whirring escalators. I figured the place was that enormous people were bound to be spread out.
Leah figured Grace Bros, the resident department store, would be a good place to start. Somewhat dazzled by the admittedly obligatory arching windows embedded in the roof, she dragged me through a men’s clothing department and we ascended towards the top floor in search of confectionary.
After quickly surveying the Easter egg area, we decided that there wasn’t really as many on display as we required. Leah flagged down a passing sales assistant.
‘Excuse me,’ she called to the lady. ‘Can you help-’
Refusing to let Leah complete her sentence, the drone replied ‘That woman over there can help you,’ and stabbed towards a checkout area. She then continued floating around the area, with an apparently vague sense of destination.
‘Well, thanks for being no help at all, you idiotic cow,’ Leah remarked a little too loudly for my liking, although I secretly admired how she spoke her mind. I’d never seen her react like this to someone else besides me. We called each other names all the time.
When Leah picked up a nearby Easter egg and threatened to hurl it at the sales assistant’s head, I decided to quickly smooth the situation, and coaxed it out of her hand. She’d never gone that far with me before. This was getting quite interesting.
We looked around for a more willing sales assistant, and spotted a young man stocking some shelves with Toblerone chocolate.
‘I’m wondering if you can help us,’ Leah politely peeped.
‘Sure,’ the Toblerone man obliged.
‘We’re buying some Easter eggs for our company, but they all have to be these two colours,’ she motioned, waving at the company logo I was holding up. I felt very The Price Is Right.
‘Right. Uh…’ Toblerone trailed off.
‘I hope you can help us, because that incessantly rude woman before didn’t,’ Leah threatened. I noted fearfully that a rather large Humpty-Dumpty Beanie-Egg! was within easy grasp for her, and candy-coated chocolate could be flying forth any moment now.
‘To be honest, I don’t work here,’ Toblerone man explained. ‘Sorry I can’t help you. I just work for Toblerone.’
‘You’ve actually been the most helpful person here yet,’ I admitted.
‘Glad to be of service,’ Toblerone nodded at us, and off we searched for someone else. The only person we could locate was the rude woman who we’d first spoken to, and I was desperate to keep Leah away from her.
‘Oh, there’s some baskets,’ I pointed out. ‘Let’s grab one to hold the eggs,’ I continued, pulling her away from the sales assistant before she could notice.
It was then the difficult selection began: selecting cheaper eggs would let us buy a greater quality, but they looked crappy. There were some wonderful egg gift packages, but they weren’t in the required colours. The eggs that were perfect cost five times more than we were willing to pay. Plus, there was one line of eggs which came with free Mister Egg poseable figures, which I quite liked. The selection was difficult, to say the least.
In the end, we chose a particular type of egg which represented a decent compromise between quality and price, and collected a reasonable amount of eggs in our basket. I felt like I was a contestant on Cash Bonanza as I filled the basket with blue eggs. Leah must have sensed this - Cash Bonanza jokes are one of our favourites - and she screamed ‘GO BLUE TEAM!’ at the top of her voice, which alarmed other shoppers somewhat.
We arrived at the cash register, and an elederly lady began scanning our eggs through one by one, painstakingly slow. I began wondering if I’d just experienced menopause by the time she’d totalled everything up.
Leah attempted to use a corporate credit card to pay for our purchase, and strangely, it was declined.
‘It says ‘Contact Issuer,’ the checkout lady explained, pointing to the receipt she’d just printed. ‘So you probably haven’t paid your credit card bill or something.’
‘Well, firstly,’ Leah immediately began, ‘I wouldn’t go around accusing people of not paying bills - they could take offense to that.’
I decided to quickly escape the area by returning the wicker basket to where we found it. This I did rather quickly because… well, I don’t want to be known as a guy who carries wicker around.
Eggs in hand, we burst forth from the department store and began searching for an exit. We weren’t sure which shops we’d walked past and which ones we hadn’t, and everything began looking the same.
We couldn’t help but stumble over a badly located shop. It was one of those strangely placed stores in shopping centres which crop up more and more nowadays. These shops are placed smack bang in the middle of a walkway, in an apparent effort to squeeze as much rent money as possible from the shopping centre. Usually occupied by outlets such as Wendy’s icecream outlets, jewellery repair shops and travel agents, on this occasion it was a mobile phone accessories outlet.
We stopped and begged for advice on the location of the exit to the shopping centre. I even worked a terrible joke into my question (making sure my shopping bag packed with Easter eggs was visible, I told the mobile phone shop guy that it would be ‘eggs-celent’ if he could help us). Interestingly, he was notably vague in his directions.
It wasn’t good enough for Leah. ‘All we want to find is the eggs-it!’ she demanded, before collapsing in a fit of laughter, causing the man to no longer take us seriously. Sighing, we trundled onwards, guessing we weren’t on ground level and descending to a lower floor.
Over the next half an hour (most literally), we attempted escape from the shopping centre. After an extended period stuck in a Coles supermarket (we accidentally entered because we thought there might be another exit to the store), we eventually emerged, but not before noticing that the Coles eggs were half the price of the ones we’d just purchased.
Swearing at this discovery, Leah made a quick phone call to our manager, explaining we’d be late back from lunch because we were stuck inside the local Westfield Shoppingtown.
Except she left a voicemail, and she didn’t say we were stuck in a Westfield Shoppingtown, she said we were stuck in a Coles Supermarket and couldn’t find our way out.
‘You can’t say that!’ I sighed. ‘How stupid are we going to look if he thinks we’re stuck in a supermarket and can’t get out?’
We eventually found ourselves walking outside the shopping centre, and although relieved, we weren’t sure where to go next. I suggested we walk around the perimeter of the shopping centre - surely we would spot our carpark if we did that.
Except we didn’t. And on top of that, we ended up in the same place we’d started at: outside the exit to Grace Bros in the shopping centre.
Leah laughed, completely exhausted at this point and beyond caring. I suddenly felt an eerie sense of falling victim to a somewhat corporate Blair Witch Project.
‘I reckon Westfield employ crack teams of anarchist architects, designing shopping centres specifically made to make exit difficult,’ I decided.
After wandering around aimlessly, we eventually remembered where the carpark was, and entered it. To find that neither of us could recall where Leah had parked her car. After looking like potential car thieves and wandering around listlessly, we stumbled upon Leah’s car by mistake. I remarked that this whole day so far felt like a well-planned out episode of The Mole. I further added that if we were on an episode of The Mole, Leah would be bloody high on the list of my suspects for the mole.
As we prepared to speed out through the car park exit, an angry monobrowed woman, screeched at us to stop. Apparently we didn’t qualify for the free parking period, because we hadn’t spent any money at the shopping centre above the car park.
‘We didn’t know you had to do that,’ I protested, pouting.
‘You DO,’ she hollered in return.
‘There’s not much there besides an Indian take-away shop and a superstore for baby needs,’ I whined. ‘We got lost in Westfield, too. Have pity on us.’
She rolled her eyes, having heard stories from distressed Westfield victims before, and projected her hand towards us, motioning for gold coins. Knowing the usual theatre Leah and I were about to go through regarding her handbag, I quickly fished out my wallet and paid for our parking.
Leah quickly turned out onto the road and promptly crashed into the back of a Ford. She shrieked, and immediately I was on edge. I’ve seen Crash, that movie about a couple who find car crashes an extremely erotic turn-on. Ever since then, I’ve been wary around car crashes. Especially if I’m involved in them.
Keeping a careful eye on Leah and making sure that the shriek was due to shock and not excitement, she wearily exchanged contact details with the yuppie driving the Ford, who seemed smugly amused. I couldn’t hear the conversation because I was still inside the car, but I’m sure he was being unfairly sarcastic.
Over an hour and a half late, Leah and I eventually arrived back to work with our tails between our legs. As I lugged the Easter eggs from the back seat of her car, I noticed they’d begun melting.
‘No!’ Leah cried desperately, and stamped her foot. Her handbag, sensing that this was Leah’s special day, decided to implode, and erupted its contents across the pavement.
By this point, she was beyond words, and sat on the bonnet of her car, gaping in disbelief at what had just happened.
‘Don’t worry darl, I’m not having the best day myself,’ a kindly voice spoke behind us. Turning, we noticed it was another female employee from our company, sitting at a picnic table with two other women. ‘I smashed my car this week too.’
‘You wouldn’t believe what just happened to us,’ Leah spoke. ‘First, I got lost in the shopping centre and couldn’t find my way out.’
‘I got lost too,’ I was quick to add.
‘Then I smashed my car,’ she continued. I began to add that I was a part of the car crash too, but was interrupted.
‘My boyfriend told me he wants to take a break the other day,’ one of the other women interjected.
‘I got my handbag stolen,’ another lady noted.
‘My handbag is all over the pavement,’ Leah wailed.
‘My house nearly got burnt down yesterday,’ I meekly offered, desperate to be a part of the group, but my hardships went unnoticed, as the women comisserated between themselves. A house fire just wasn’t good enough.
