Role-playing

One of the few creatively fulfilling tasks I perform at Badvertiser is writing complaint letters for my boss Neo. For some reason, he has a multitude of things to complain about, and moreover, he likes to complain about them in a legally documented matter, signed in black ink. Fortunately, I love complaining—in which case, my complaint letters are veritable masterpieces, second only to the limited-edition series of poop signs I was honorably commissioned to draft in my first month or so at Badvertiser.

Neo’s away on a business trip in France, but he emailed me last week, asking me to write a letter about a poor Werizon Wireless customer service experience he encountered before leaving the country. The details of the debacle weren’t nearly as intriguing as the post script:

“Do you want anything from Paris?”

Maybe we’re just becoming good friends; I water the plant in his office, and he asks me questions about how my other jobs are going. We talk about screenwriting a lot, as we have since my days at Café Gypsy, serving Neo as a customer.

Or maybe we aren’t good friends; maybe he’s just the prototypical executive who has no handle on the minutiae of everyday life; one time, as a special errand, I went to return a defective digital recorder he purchased for a pronunciation class, only to find that it functioned perfectly well when I inserted batteries. maybe he needs me, his prototypical secretary, to play the paid role of assistant/wife.

But even so, can’t a boss buy a secretary expensive foreign things?

Being the moderately honorable person that I am, I resisted asking Neo to bring me back anything I couldn’t afford to buy myself, a tenet to which I stubbornly adhere when it comes to anyone buying me anything, especially men. So, disappointingly, I merely requested that he bring me back a French copy of a book I’ve been trying to track down for a friend of mine.

A lackluster request, I know. I’m just not one to drool over Italian leather purses.

Food, on the other hand... let’s just say I won’t turn down a jar of French black truffles, if Neo so chooses to define what seems to be our budding prototypical executive-secretary relationship.