It’s not a Garden of Eden Allegory

greyhame on Jan. 4, 2007

Dear reader, I give you… Frank the Snake. Call him a co-star, call him a side-kick, and call him what you want but he is the dark yang to Ben’s yin. The Garth to Ben’s Wayne, The Randal to Ben’s Dante, and the drunken kleptomaniac snake to Ben’s… Ben.

*Ahem*

Let me preface this by saying that Frank is really one of the only characters that is seriously based on a real person. Most of the characters are a comical skewering of an amalgam of people that we worked with but Frank is pretty strait up Frank. There is some skewering there yes, like the whole talking snake with eyebrows thing. And the real Frank doesn’t live in a tree in the midst of the store. Other than that it’s pretty much true to life, but in a “please Frank don’t sue us” kind of way. Anything that could be consider libel is made up from here on out. And my lawyer is nodding to me now so we got that out of the way.

Our Parody of Frank is a raging and unapologetic alcoholic, so expect a few jokes about drunks. I apologize in advance for offending any drunks who feel that Frank is a misrepresentation of their people. Take it up with the ACLU.

I won’t go on and on about the character of Frank because, like Ben, his character will develop as you continue to read our little cyber yarn. But I will end with a short memory of the real Frank:

When we worked at the store, which shall remain nameless, we were required weekly to travel an hour to a conference room in Columbus to have mindless meetings about new products and sales techniques. It was literally the single most mind numbing waste of time that I can recall, and I used to watch “Joey”.

We would usually car pool to the meeting, suffer through it and then retire to Hooters, Olive Garden, or any of the other nearby restaurants and proceed to get lit up on cheap happy hour priced adult beverages. Now I’m not much for drinking anymore but at the time let’s say that I was more easily persuaded. And this was always after the meeting anyway so no real harm done, that was until we car pooled with Frank.

Now this was the morning edition of the two times you could attend the meeting so, I kid you not, it was like 7:30 in the morning. We pull into the parking lot and there is Frank waiting to take us up to the meeting. We hop in, at 7:30 in the morning mind you, and we are greeted with frosty Heinekens. Not a six pack, not a twelve pack, a freaking case. Did I mention that it was 7:30 in the morning?

Now I was 20 years old at the time and knew nothing of the “Five ‘O’ Clock” rule. Propriety was not high on my list of things to worry about at that time in my life. What I’m saying is I was not the bastion of high societal ethics that I am now. Anyway, we cracked into that bitter case like men obsessed and in the hour long drive between little Chillicothe and the great metropolis of Columbus we went through well over half of that case. Not something I would recommend at 7:30 in the morning, or ever really. It was certainly not a professional high for me, and nothing I would ever now repeat. In any event we went into the meeting reeking of booze and several sheets to the wind.

What we had not known is that this meeting in particular would be a “Class participation” sort of endeavor. I’ll let that sink in…

Well, for reasons that should be obvious, the details from there are a little fuzzy but I recall Frank participating in the meeting as if nothing at all were amiss. The man was the very picture of a consummate professional, hell I think that the booze actually worked in his favor. He pitched the new line of Sony Vaio laptops to the regional manager with such poise and elocution that I wondered if he had filled his bottles with Red Bull. And he took the heat off of us by being the one guy from our location that got up and made the pitch.

That was the ebb and flow of working with Frank. He would do things that if you wrote them down and put them in a column on one piece of paper that you would think “Oh my good lord I need to stay away from this person” but for some reason you gave him a pass because it was Frank. He was like the only person that could sell $3000 worth of stuff to your customers and you wouldn’t get mad. You’d get mad at ANYONE ELSE but Frank was just… well… Frank.