My wife bought some novelty Halloween hand towels for the bathroom. They triggered a flashback–
“What color towels should I get for my bathroom?”
Even now, almost forty years later, remembering the question fills me with puzzlement and slight existential dread, a reminder of a terrible summer job I had back in 1988. I was working in the housewares section at Montgomery Ward (a.k.a “Wards” or “Monkey Wards”), and I was miserable.
My summer job at Wards was a bit of a last resort. I had foolishly left a wonderful job at a bookstore chain the summer before. When my cool manager announced he was leaving, I decided to quit too. The job was fun, interesting, and the summer hours were great, but I had grown tired of coming home to put in a weekend shift.
My friend Eric was in similar straits. After he snagged a job in the warehouse, he encouraged me to apply. Eric was honest about the potential misery of the position. The warehouse manager was a crotchety old grump. Still, the consolation was that we could at least hang out while on the job.
But I got stuck in housewares instead.
The specific reason was that the department needed a “boy” to go up on the Wall of Lamps, an insanely tall display of plugged-in lamps in cubicles. The lamps sometimes needed lightbulbs changed, or a customer would want the display model. Whatever the reason, going up there was a perilous adventure. The cubicle shelves were unstable, constantly threatening to tip over at the slightest touch and throw hot lamps at my head as I was balancing alone on top of a step ladder.
The Wall of Lamps was not the most frustrating part of the job, though. In fact, something about it still intrigues me like a trap in an Indiana Jones movie would. The customers were, in fact, the most frustrating part of the job because they could not handle the Wall of Towels.
The housewares section had this truly impressive display of towels. Similar to the Wall of Lamps, the Wall of Towels is set like a rainbow of colors along the wall. Like the Bifrost Bridge that leads to Asgard, the Wall of Towels seemed to promise a path to a glorious bathroom decorating experience. The wonders of this display sometimes shorted out some customers’ minds, though. It was too much for some of the mortals of Midgard.
Several times a day, customers would come up and ask me, “What color towels should I get for my bathroom?” I would ask what color their bathrooms were. Inevitably, the answer would be “blue and white.” So I would suggest blue and white towels. The customer would just stand there, lost in the infinite prism of towel variety. Some would kind of give up and wander off. Others would eventually get blue and white towels.
By the end of July, I had grown thoroughly disenchanted with this job. One of my co-workers was a tiresome creep. The managers were bonkers, but not in any fun kind of way. And the customers. Oh, the customers!
So one day, surely in the period where I’d given my two-week notice, when a customer asked, “What color towels should I get for my bathroom?”, when I had asked, “What color is your bathroom?”, and I had gotten the reply of “blue and white,” I tried a different approach.
“Oh,” I said, “You want black and orange!” I then walked her over to the wall and pulled a black towel and an orange towel to show her.
“Black and orange?” she asked.
“Sure,” I replied, “Just like Halloween. It’s all the rage.”
The customer thought for a bit and said, “I don’t know. I think I’ll just get black and orange.”
I put on a little fake snooty attitude and replied, “Well, okay, if you want to be gauche.”
Our new bathroom towels have dancing skeletons in skirts. But I realize now, it’s missing some orange.