Cooler Words

I have held many jobs in my time, mostly bad ones, as befits a liberal arts major with a lousy attitude and no understanding of proper accessorizing. When you're overeducated, broke, and bitter, you're certain to wind up working for an hourly wage for and with complete morons. Thus, I've got a million stories, but this one definitely ranks in the top ten.

Sales for a certain conference were low, despite relentless cheerleading and snappy copywriting on my part. (Bear in mind that my bitterness here stems from not actually being one of the people paid to plan and execute conferences. I was just the hack who was responsible for hawking the event.) The actual reasons for the slow sales could mostly be laid at the feet of one incredibly dim bulb, who did not understand what customers would want in a conference, and didn't care anyway. More and more of the actual conference planning had fallen to me and a buddy of mine, until at long last she had no actual work to do. However, the pressure to improve sales was still on her delicate shoulders, and so she did the only thing she knew how to do - she tried to blame me.

"Couldn't you write something on the website?" she inquired breathlessly a few minutes into the conversation. I looked up from my desk, covered from stem to stern with paper, event plans, contest props, and checklists, all in an attempt to salvage something from this conference scheduled to occur in less than three weeks. My instinctive urge to kill was overridden by the assurances from my boss that he would NOT, in fact, bail me out of jail if I committed a felony. So I controlled myself, and responded along the lines of, "There are already a number of announcements on the website. I think more might be considered excessive. Maybe even desperate."

She flapped her hands vaguely. "Well, maybe you could use... cooler words."

COOLER. WORDS.

Cooler words? This complete waste of precious oxygen, who once criticized me and another friend for using big words (such as "panacea," mind you), who could not write her way out of a wet paper bag, whose every written phrase contained at least two misspellings and an egregious example of exclamation point abuse, who once posted her salary (considerably higher than the typical employee) to a public message board, WHO BORE THE BLAME FOR THE LOUSY SALES IN THE FIRST PLACE, was offering me advice? And her advice was that I should use "cooler words"? I'd been on edge all week, and this was the last straw. So furious that I was near tears, I repeated this insanity to my friends.

They did the only thing they could do, really. They took the punchline, embraced it, and started whacking me with it. It's practically a mantra.

I love them. I haven't had friends like that since college.