On Professionally Fluffing Pillows
The temp agency told me I’d be greeting people on their way
into a furniture showroom, handing out fliers and pamphlets, things like that.
It sounded ok. To be fair, doing almost anything that results in a paycheck sounds
good these days. I’ve still refused to stoop as low as becoming that guy that
calls rich people to ask them to donate money so some diseased children can go to
a camp (which the temp agency also asked me to do). I’d work at McDonalds
before I’d become a telemarketer. Or work at Subway (which was advertising
“Sandwich Artist” jobs available at their location in my neighborhood),
slapping slimy, cold meat onto bread all day. At least McDonalds sells fruit
now.
But back to the furniture gig. It warrants describing
exactly how the position came to be, as far as I could piece together from my
few brief hours of eavesdropping on people talking about it. The people I
worked for were a furniture company that specialized in the manufacture of
“casual furnishings,” which is to say patio furniture, but really, really nice patio furniture. Think what
you would see surrounding the pool at the Bellagio or a Hilton (to name two
locations I heard name-dropped). Faux-stone topped tables that could retail anywhere
between one and six thousand dollars, patio umbrella, extra. Fire pits for
grilling meat or toasting marshmallows in that same range. We’re talking sets
of furniture that could cost what a new car would cost me. All for things meant
to be left outside to sun-bleach, get shat upon by nature and which invariably
end up all wet and nasty whenever it rains. That in this part of the country
would be completely useless at least six months out of the year, given that no
one wants to sit outside and toast marshmallows when it’s snowing.
These manufacturers, like car companies, roll out new models
each year. Car companies do this at auto shows. Casual furniture manufacturers
do this at a show in the Merchandise Mart, an enormous cube just outside of Chicago’s
downtown Loop. It looks imposingly Soviet, all gray and angular from the
outside. Its logo on display in the elevators, two superimposed M’s, looks
“like a supervillain’s insignia,” one of my fellow furniture workers observed.
At this show, people who own furniture shops in other parts
of the country (or possibly middlemen? It was hard to tell), come sit on,
admire, and cluck about the new “pieces” that the manufacturers’ salespeople
are showing off. There’s a lot of inside-baseball type talk about what’s hot,
what’s not, how the marketplace is changing. The salespeople demonstrate the
capabilities of the furniture to the potential vendors (“See, this ottoman can be topped by a cushion, or Voila! Velcro the cushion off, and you can put a
table top on it!”), and once everyone’s satisfied with the amount of time
spent sitting and commenting on a particular furniture group, they move on to
another display.
This is where I came in. When I got to the showroom and
found the woman I was told to report to, who I’ll call Rachael (a very kind, if
overstressed lady, it should be said), she explained that I would not be
greeting people, or handing out pamphlets. Instead, after the salespeople had
demonstrated the “multi-functionality” of a particular furniture set to a group
of vendors, I was to swoop in and rearrange the furniture so that it looked as
if no one had previously sat upon it. This included scooting chairs so that
sets of four sat at 90-degree angles to each other around a table, while sets
of two were arranged at an inviting diagonal facing a sofa. I was to replace
the pillows “nicely.” Also, because free food and drink was being served
throughout the day, if anyone left a mostly-empty cup or plate on a table after
“having clearly moved on,” I was to take the leavings and dispose of them
discreetly. If someone was sitting with an empty cup or plate and was clearly not moving on, I was to ask them
politely if I could take their trash and walk the ten feet to the nearest
garbage can to toss it for them.
This was to be my job, for three eight-hour days. I longed
internally for the chance to distribute pamphlets with a smile and a hearty
“Welcome to”… wherever I was working. I came to think of them as Orange
Juice-Hued Casual Furnishings, for the color of their sign and as a playful
take on their actual name. “Welcome to OJ Furnishings, we hope you enjoy our
new fire pits and deep seating units!” See, I totally could have pulled that
off.
“Deep seating” was one of many terms I was able to pick up
on while trying to look busy while actually just walking about aimlessly, which
was an explicit and the most unfortunate part of my job. Deep seating is what a
normal person would call “furniture with cushions on it.” This is as opposed to
“Sling,” which is a style of chairs with a sort of thin plastic-y mesh backing
to them. I learned what a Chaise Lounge is (that long plastic thing you see
people laying on by pools which I had previously referred to as simply a
“lounge chair”). In addition, each furniture collection had a vaguely
Italian-sounding name. Banchetto. Venetto. I can’t remember any others, but I’m
sure there were more that ended in -etto.
It was in this tastefully arranged showroom amongst
furniture groupings labeled with these absurd names that I got to “work.” I
would estimate that for every minute I spent putting furniture back into its
correct position, I probably spent about nine minutes doing nothing. Or rather,
doing nothing cleverly disguised as something worthy of being paid ten dollars
an hour for. Walking slowly from one end of the showroom to the other, pausing
to evaluate the placement of white pillows on a blue sofa thoughtfully while
stroking my chin. Slightly adjusting the
signs announcing the faux-Italian names of the furniture groups to more
inviting angles. Picking lint, fuzzies and hair off of sofas while stealing a
few moments off my feet. That was my way around the cruelest irony of my job:
that in a room full of comfortable seating options, I was supposed to remain on
my feet the whole time I was working.
I realize I’m in danger of coming off as an overprivileged
whiner by writing this. After all, lots of people have jobs that require them
to do awful, disgusting, hideous things. All the people on Dirty Jobs. People who walk dogs in a city. The aforementioned
Subway employees. I got free breakfast and lunch (which, it should be said, was
catered and absolutely delicious: fresh strawberries, blueberries, raspberries
and amazing veggie-hashbrowns for breakfast; grilled veggie sandwiches and make-your-own
burritos for lunch) plus ten bucks an hour to be a magical
furniture-straightening elf. To be clear, I’m not complaining. Never mind that
a child could easily have done the job just as well as I did, that it was
boring, and an insult to my intelligence; none of that really bothered me. I
would much rather have been fluffing these past two weeks than doing nothing at
home, which is mostly what I have been doing.
To put things in perspective, the week before my time at OJ,
I was a professional table assembler/furniture unwrapper/mover for another
company participating in the Casual Furnishings Expo. The week after, I
bubblewrapped overstock and moved furniture on dollies between floors of the
Mart for a third casual furnishings company. I enjoyed my time at each, and
feel no need to go on for pages about my experiences there, because neither was
ridiculous. At those two, I was doing real, physical work that was both clearly
useful and necessary for the companies I was working for. OJ, in contrast, paid
me to do nothing for nine-tenths of my workday, and to do things
that their bloviating salespeople could have easily done while they weren’t
sales-pitching for the other tenth. My being there was a complete waste of both
my time and their money, in other words, despite Rachael’s insistence to the
contrary (“They get so into their pitches… you being right there doing the work
you do really helps them stay focused,”
she told me).
It was the layers upon layers of waste that really got to me
about OJ. My job. The furniture itself. The free food (and alcohol!) for
everyone that entered the showroom. The
show, the point of which was to exhibit the furniture for potential sellers,
but at which no furniture was actually sold or distributed. All of it made me
feel like the company was an outdated, bloated, malignant lump just waiting to
be excised by IKEA, the internet, and capitalism’s love of efficiency.
But then, what do I know? I was just a fluffer, after all,
someone the salespeople deigned not worthy of being spoken to; I make no claims
to understand all of the complexities and intricacies of the casual furnishings
industry. And it did seem as though their show went well enough, with gaggles
of furniture people being shuttled around the showroom for at least the first
day and a half. I dutifully scooted, fluffed, adjusted, de-linted, and walked
around with what I hoped looked like a spring in my step. I took something
approaching pride in how nice my pillows looked after I’d fluffed them and
arranged them just so. I tried to get
in touch with my inner fussy gay stylist. After people had been sitting in the
same chairs long enough for me to do a dozen laps around the showroom, I’d try
to telepathically move them so that I could then readjust their chairs, but to
no avail. After every couple of laps, I would duck into this little storage
area in the back and sip some of the vitamin water I’d brought, or snag a free
blueberry off of the catering spread, or position myself behind a pillar at the
end of the showroom so that no one else could see me and stretch my back out (I
look really bizarre when I stretch my back (which I do by rolling my shoulders
around while contorting my spine to different angles), which is unfortunate,
because I feel the need to do it often, especially when standing/walking for
long periods of time). I’d also try to spend some time during each lap just
staring out of the only window in the showroom at the sprawling metropolis
below me. Imagining how spectacular all of the furniture would look while
flying through the air out that window before splintering into a million shards
of plastic, fiberglass, and twisted hunks of aluminum on the pavement 16 floors
below.
To ensure that I had even less to do than I would have
otherwise, I had a counterpart-fluffer (who I found out at the end of the
second day was actually Rachael’s son), who shares his name with a recently
deposed prime minister of Italy. I was explicitly told not to fluff in the same
general area as he was, so I restricted my interactions with him to giving him
knowing nods as we crossed paths in the middle of the showroom. Again. And
again. And again. I didn’t interact at all with the salespeople, despite how
much I wanted to ask the one who was the spitting image of Rod Blagojevich if
he was related to Illinois’ recently incarcerated former governor. Rachael, for
her part, tried to keep my spirits up with such perky quips as “I know it’s
really boring, but hey, only three hours left for today!”
By the third day, apparently all of the people who’d wanted
to see OJ furniture had already seen it. There were maybe five people who came
into the showroom all day who were not employees of the company. There were
only so many times that I could walk past furniture that no one had sat in and
pretend to perfect its position. Eventually I just started sitting on furniture
groupings that weren’t visible from the front desk and using my phone to
organize my Gmail inbox, ogle Facebook, and beg my brother to play words on Words
With Friends. Rachael mercifully recognized the situation for what it was, and
let me leave two hours early. She was also sweet enough to offer me a parting
gift of any alcohol that I wanted to take out of the kitchen pantry. I selected
three bottles of fancy Belgian-style ales that I’d longed to sample, one for
each day of my life that I’d wasted as a professional fluffer, and left. I
hopped on a Brown Line train from the L stop conveniently connected to the
Mart, and made it home in time to see most of Jeopardy!, and both episodes of Who
Wants To Be A Millionaire. Such are the small pleasures that chronic
un/underemployment affords me.
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