I SELL ROBOTS

I know that every once in a while, you probably wonder what it would be like to work part time at a robot store. The idea of spending one’s time in such a way may seem like the kind of fantastical pipe dream that only dedicated stoners or the founders of Build-a-Bear enjoy, but I know you’ve at least thought about it. Much like moon-boot emporiums, robot stores are another tertiary detail from the future that we were promised (by Philip K. Dick), but never fully received. I guess someone could say that this future has been actualized in inventions like the Internet and in people like Thomas Grillo, but I’d trade that shit for functional humanoid consumer robots and the stores that sell them especially since I work at one now, and it’s as perfect as my imagination could ever have conjured.

The robot store I work part-time at is owned by a middle-aged man named Greg who looks and acts like the adult version of any member of Garth Algar’s entourage. Greg is the kind of person who never developed any natural dexterity from sports, so when he runs, he always looks like he’s just now learning the basic mechanics. More importantly, he has what I think most people consider the “classic wildcard” personality. As a result of this, his life has always sat right on the cusp of wildly extraordinary and extraordinarily average. I imagine that in high school when people were filling out their list of superlatives, people almost bubbled in Greg’s name under “most likely to succeed” before second-guessing themselves because of the suspiciously high amount of Queensrÿche that he listens to. Prior to owning a robot store, he repaired pinball machines and was a roadie for Anthrax and Poison. Every once in a while when he’s staring at tax forms, filling out payroll, or doing any other mundane task that’s required in running your own business, he says “I really wish I went to college.” As the only person at the shop with a college degree, I feel that it’s my responsibility to say, “Hey Greg, cheer up. Devry is kind of like college!” This never seems to make him feel better, but I honestly can’t imagine that anything I learned in college is 1/3 as important as what someone would learn as a roadie for Anthrax.

Greg is filled with incredibly bizarre anecdotes that always seem to surface at inappropriate times. A few days ago, I was trying to show an eight-year-old how to use a screwdriver when the motor fell off and Greg came screaming out of the shadows with, “I used to have a car like that. Once, I was on a date with a girl and I drove over this huge puddle and there was a hole in the floorboards, so the puddle splashed the girl in the face.” Fortunately Greg has an instinctive ability to tell seemingly interesting stories with the personality flair of a Deloite employee, so the 8-year old remained unphased, probably assuming that this type of event was a normal foible of adult life.

He is married to a maternal, but shockingly volatile Romanian woman named Ana. She co-owns the robot store and so has the authority to throw her opinion onto whatever business issue she feels worthy of her input. 99 out of 99 times, this means sussing out Greg’s stance on a subject then taking the exact opposite stance, so they end up having awesome fights about mundane, but nevertheless robot-related, matters all day long. The last fight started when Ana tried to address an envelope to a distributor of Lost in Space merchandise, but failed. Greg gave a defeated sigh and tried to teach her, but she ignored him and watched videos of Josh Groban on YouTube instead. In the distinctly predictable tone of a man at the losing end of any number of old arguments, he asked me to help her, so I pointed to the top left corner and said “there”, which solved the problem. Their relationship is so much of a consumer spectacle that sometimes, arguments are literally prefaced by Ana bringing scones for the staff. This has actually happened four times now, which gives me reason to believe that it would be in my best advantage to provoke Ana around 10:00am, and skip breakfast from now on.

To be fair, I didn’t really have any real reason to expect groundbreaking scientists to be my coworkers, apart from the fact that I tend to think in hyperboles. Apart from Greg and Ana, I am one of only two other employees at the robot store. Co-worker Matt uses the robot store as a means of paying his dues on his current career path as a synth player in a sci-fi MST3K-styled garage band called The Earth Program; a name derived from the movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Because we are such a small operation he and I are very rarely at the store at the same time, but when we are, we usually begin and end every conversation talking about the Unicorns. Co-worker James is 11 and talks to me mostly about rap music. Three days ago, he saw The Matrix for the first time, probably because he didn’t exist when most people were watching The Matrix.

There used to be a third employee named Erin who told me one day that she only dates Hispanics because she’s had restraining orders with every other race. Much like Greg, she was excellent at telling stories with a misplaced blasé. Unlike Greg, however, whose stories still retain a vague sense of realism, Erin’s all seem to involve stolen plot points from old westerns and gangster films. They all come back to Central America in one way or another, and they all end tragically or in legal problems. Still, she tells her stories with a tone I’d use to tell someone the story of how I’m about to go to the grocery store. She used to send out emails that looked like they’d been typed in fist, which combined with her Latin American predilections, led me to believe she wasn’t a native-born citizen. Later I found out that she was born and raised in the suburbs to an average non-foreign family, so that means she’s either crazy or just so bored out of her skull that her brain turned on the TV. She still comes into the store to say hi every once in a while, and always seems to have between 1 to 3 different Latino children in her arms. I’ve yet to see any repeat children.

Though our robot store is primarily a robot store, it also doubles as a robot museum filled with a veritable Radio Shack’s worth of past attempts to jumpstart the robot market. Obviously this points a big mechanical finger at the nature of Greg’s business model being roughly, “I like robots, so I’m going to start a robot store.” I mean, I really love lime popsicles, but starting a lime popsicle store would be absolutely ridiculous. Sure I’d have a few resolute customers who share my appreciation for this incredibly small facet of our world, and I’m sure that they might want to recite to me all of the lime popsicle references in obscure cult sci-fi films they’ve seen, or share their lime popsicle celebrity body molds that they’ve made, but the other 98% of my clientele would be people who walk into the store solely because it exists and they want to know how it’s possible that a business that specific could actually make money. Just in case you missed it, there are parallels between my fictitious lime popsicle store and the robot store. However, we do make money. Greg is a smart man. Early in the robot store’s existence, he performed a cunning audible and struck gold (pyrite) by dipping his fingers in the lucrative business of birthday parties and afterschool workshops. I initially got my part-time job when Greg asked me, “Can you come to a birthday party on Sunday? We’re going to have like twelve kids and I really don’t want to spend my Sunday with kids.” Now I spend my Sunday afternoons eating strangers’ children’s’ birthday cake and listening to Kraftwerk.

Let this quell your imagination about what it’s like to work part-time at a robot store. I imagine that the only real parallels to what you were thinking in your head and our store is that we sell robots, and spend most of the day listening to Kraftwerk. Despite the fact that my original presumptions about working in a robot stores were ground into a fine powder, I’m holding out hope that I’m at the ground level of a revolution. I, Robot plays for six hours a day on the robot store television, and I can’t help but entertain my suspicion of the similarities. Granted, the only recognizable likeness between RobotCity Workshop and that film is that it takes place in Chicago, but in the back of my mind, I have faith that our humble robot store could be the future location for U.S. Robotics. It’s hardly outlandish to think that the entrepreneurship of an old Anthrax roadie is the ticket to the future.

BEN MAJOY