My father dropped out of high school his very first day. As he related to me later, he was a little late to his first class and wasn’t sure if he was in the right classroom. He wasn’t. The teacher replied sarcastically, and the classroom broke out in laughter. Humiliated, my father walked out of the classroom – and the school. He never went back.
My dad was something of a punk in those years; many kids in the neighborhood were. I don’t know if it was pride that fed into his decision to drop out, or shame. The two emotions are far more interconnected with each other than I had previously suspected, so much so they are hard to tell apart when certain situations pop up.
I woke up around 5am this morning, extremely sleepy but ready and willing to go to work. After a series of failures on the temp agency front, one finally took me on. My first assignment was absurdly easy: sit behind a table for ten hours and hand out kits to conventioneers. I could do this in my sleep. (In fact, I probably would have done it in my sleep: despite taking a couple of sleeping pills after dinner and going to bed early, I was unable to fall asleep until around 1:30am, giving me fewer than four hours of sleep.) I had to be at the Hilton O’Hare hotel at 7am sharp; the hotel was at the airport, which meant I had a long commute ahead. Still, I was prepared: last night I had my pants and shirt laid out, I studied the bus and train routes I had to take, and determined I would need to leave home a little after 5:30am in order to get to the hotel on time. I had my time sheet, my company rule book, a printed copy of my assignment, a copy of the bus schedule, my iPod…I was good to go. Although I left the apartment a few minutes later than I wanted to, I felt prepared in every way.
The trip to the airport was uneventful. I made both trains and the bus on time, there were no CTA-style delays, and I made it to the Hilton at 6:55am. I wasn’t sure where the convention room was, so I walked over to a hotel employee.
“Excuse me,” I asked, “do you know where the north central event room is?”
The employee looked at me, confused. “I don’t know of that room.” he replied, “Are you sure you’re at the right hotel?”
I showed my assignment to him, and we both saw the same thing at once: the assignment was at the Hyatt O’Hare hotel. Too late, he pointed it out to me. The blood in my face frantically attempted to flee to safer sections of my body. Wherever the Hyatt hotel was, I knew, it was not at the airport.
“There’s a shuttle to the Hyatt upstairs,” he said, “go across the street, you can pick up the shuttle there. It will take you right to the hotel.”
I checked my iPod. 6:57am. The odds of arriving on time had suddenly dropped from one hundred percent to about nil. Still, I figured, I could still make it only a few minutes late and blame the CTA. So I ran up the escalator and across the street to meet up with the shuttle bus. There were many shuttle busses waiting at the curb: Westin, Holiday Inn - but no Hyatt. I muttered darkly to myself: should I go downstairs and grab a cab? Nah, I thought. I had five bucks on me, enough for extra bus fare, but not for a cab. O’Hare cabs also take credit cards, I thought, but I chose to save the money and wait for the shuttle bus. After all, all the other hotel shuttles were here; how long would it take for the Hyatt shuttle to arrive?
Twenty minutes, it turned out.
The longer I waited, the more frustrated I became. Why did I think it was the Hilton? Was it because I had worked at the airport for two years, and when somebody refers to the airport hotel, I immediately presume it’s the hotel inside the airport? When I discussed the assignment with my temp boss and assured her I had worked at the airport and knew where the Hilton was, did she not hear me right and thus not correct me? Why didn’t I read the freaking assignment more closely? Why am I such a freaking moron?
At around 7:15am, the shuttle finally arrived. I practically jumped into a seat and waited impatiently for the crowd of people behind me to take their seats. Within a minute, the shuttle was out of the airport, headed for the next hotel. While I waited, I calculated what I would say to my contact when I finally arrive. Should I tell the truth? Sure, no problem. I will admit that I hadn’t read the assignment carefully, and that I’m incapable of being trusted with a freaking e-mail, let alone other, more complex jobs that would be offered me had I completed this job successfully. Should I lie and blame the mass transit system? Sure, no problem. I will admit that I failed to alert my staffing company, as required, that I was going to be late. I did not do this: I could not do this, because I don’t own a cell phone. The rule book clearly stated that even a legitimate excuse for tardiness can be grounds for termination, and a twenty minute tardy, in my opinion, could not simply be erased with a shrug and a “Aw, you know how the trains can be.”
Five minutes later, the shuttle arrived at the Hyatt. No, wait, it was the wrong Hyatt. Yes. There are two Hyatt hotels near O’Hare, and I was at the wrong one. So I sat back down in my seat and waited, stewing in my own frustration and stupidity.
At long last, around 7:30am, I arrived at the correct Hyatt hotel. By this time, I was feeling more than frustration: I was feeling the beginnings of shame. I stood near the shuttle, weighing my options, both bad. Finally I walked into the hotel and toward the table where I was supposed to be seated a half-hour before. About ten feet from the welcome table, I stopped.
This is what I saw: a looooooong line of men and women dressed in business suits and skirts, waiting for their convention kits. Behind the table were six chairs, five of them occupied by…college-aged kids. They were calmly assembling the kits, handing the folders and buttons to each conventioneer, every one of them with young, smiling faces and polite voices. Laboring behind them, presumably, was my contact, the person in charge, a pretty lady with long, straight blonde hair, dark pantsuit, and what seemed to be look of resignation on her face. She was barely older than the employees. My shame bloomed at the sight. I stared at the empty seat at the end of the table, the seat my butt should have been filling. Next to that empty chair were these…children, children who read the assignment instructions correctly, children who arrived on time, children with no need to blubber out some lame excuse. Not only had I entered the wrong classroom, I was in the wrong school.
I could not get home fast enough. I took a cab home, regardless of the cost. As it turned out, it cost a lot: the taxi ran into three different traffic jams, one on a residential street. (I later determined I could have gotten home via train only fifteen minutes later had I not been so impatient to get home.) I typed out a letter of apology and resignation to my staffing boss, e-mailed it, and buried my face in my hands and cried.
While waiting through yet another traffic jam, I slumped in my seat and thought about my dad. I thought of the road he took in life and the decisions he made to pave that road. My father was not unintelligent; he could have graduated high school with little effort. The incident in the classroom is certainly not an uncommon error: I’m sure it’s happened to all of us. He could have laughed off his humiliation in the classroom, or slunk out and found the correct classroom, embarrassed but not defeated. But that wasn’t what happened. Either in defense of his pride or wishing not to expand his shame, he walked away. He chose to disappoint his parents, to disappoint himself, to walk the road less travelled by the same people I ran from only a couple hours before. Like my father, I need to tell the people I love what I had done so they can be angry, frustrated, disappointed in me and my actions. Like my father, I can replay the scene in my head and ask myself the myriad of what-ifs: what if I grabbed a cab instead of waiting for the shuttle bus? What if I read the instructions more carefully? What if I hadn’t quit my bookstore job so I wouldn’t be in this position? What if I had bought a cell phone months ago? What if, what if , what if. All I know is that I can’t tell pride apart from shame right now, and perhaps this is not the time to make the attempt.
