dane
this is the story of dane. dane is really his name. i considered changing his name, but i feel it is important to know that everything this person does in the coming stories is done by a man named dane.
in the fall of 2015 i started working a second job to save some extra money. i work outside service in the golf industry, which basically means that i make sure golf carts are clean/ready for use, greet people when they show up, clean their clubs, and carry their golf bag to their car when they finish. despite being my coworker, dane did none of those things.
dane is the owner’s son. dane is also the worst coworker i ever had.
on my very first day at this job, dane was my closer. that meant that from 3pm-8pm he was the only guy there. dane arrived around noon and my supervisor's parting advice to me was to “do everything the exact opposite of dane.” three hours later i realized i had not seen dane in about two and a half hours. this was surprising, given that it was about 140 more minutes than you’d ever expect to not see a coworker at this job. my supervisor told me not to take any overtime and just leave at 3, when it was revealed that dane left the property without telling anyone to go to a doctor’s appointment.
about two weeks later, dane once again showed up around noon. he approached my supervisor with a request for time off to go to his one year sobriety meeting in san diego. “of course you can go, dude,” my supervisor probably said. “that’s really awesome you did that,” i would imagine. “when is it?” he likely asked.
“today,” i believe dane said. he left to drive to california to celebrate one year of sobriety. congratulations to dane, who hopefully recently achieved two years of sobriety.
dane often embraced a jokingly (or probably not so jokingly, in hindsight) creepy persona just because. he had a very simple measure of whether a joke was funny or not: if it involved his dick, it was funny. to make up for his lack of charm, he also did not work very hard.
the two of us were not close in any way. i worked with him infrequently and did not care for him or not care for him. he did not do work, and i did not care, because it was a second job, and caring that much about a second job is entirely ridiculous.
i say that we were not close not to say that i dislike him - just to remind you that we were not close, and that what happened on a slow day that fall has me shook to this very moment, almost a year and a half later.
it is common practice in the golf industry to fill downtime with bouncing a ball up and down on the face of a golf club. so, as one often does, i’m doing this, and dane is jokingly complimenting me, and i fire back something like, “you like that? watch this!” before doing some basic trick.
just about a heartbeat later, dane fired back: “oh yeah? watch THIS!” my range of expectations based on his personalty and the situation went on a 1-10 scale where 1 is him trying and failing to do what i was doing and 10 is him impersonating the stuart character from madtv.
just about another heartbeat later, dane moved his hand toward his face. this moved my expectation meter to about a 9 (does any impression). he cupped his hand over his eye, so that moved the needle to about a 9.5 (does impression of sloth from goonies).
his next move was to pull his glass eye out of his head and show both it and his eye socket to me. i have since stopped expecting anything to happen.
as dane stood there, apparently comfortable in the knowledge that we were close enough to show each other the private holes in our bodies, he reached for, like, a batman impression done by a guy who has no chops whatsoever and said -- i shit you not, this is word for word -- “yeah... i got stabbed in the fuckin’ eye.”
the worst coworker i have ever had, a man who i had no feelings about whatsoever, and most importantly a man who is also the owner’s son has just said this to me after pulling his glass eye out of his head to show me his eye socket. i did not know whether i should be horrified, or surprised, or intrigued, or impressed, or sad, or ready to vomit.
mostly i wanted to laugh really hard, because this was the wildest shit i have ever seen in my life. suppressing the urge to laugh that day has only been made up for with the laughter i had while retelling this story while stoned to my also stoned dad.
dane told me the whole story of how he lost his eye. i forgot a lot of it because frankly it was boring shitty teens doing the things that boring shitty teens do, and it’s much more fun to watch that on cw. i do remember that he got stabbed by a glass bottle. i regret to this day that i did not ask dane if the guy smashed the bottle over the bar, or did he just happen to find a bottle broken perfectly in the shape of dane’s eyeball?
after telling his story, dane went to a pouch he had stored in his car and came back. he retreated inside our golf cart storage room for a minute and returned with an entirely new object in his eye hole. technically, it was still a glass eye, but really it was just a black eye. it was like he put a jet black marble where his eye should be.
for the first time in his career as an outside service worker, dane had the itch to do some work. for literally the only time i can remember, he stood ready to greet customers as they finished their round. he carried on a relatively normal conversation, but he did so while using one real eye and one black glass eye to stare as intensely as possible at the customers he was supposed to be helping. they didn’t react directly, but they all looked at me with a general look of tf?
dane did more things too! one time he got promoted by his dad to a position in the golf course’s restaurant that was called something awful, like, “Head of Pizza,” which is actually, in hindsight, exactly the kind of position i’d expect someone like dane to have at a golf course.
dane also one time walked outside and noticed that the bartender he had an enormous crush on was banging her boyfriend in her car right there in the parking lot. of course he started a fight right there in the parking with the boyfriend because honestly lets face it dane kind of sucks, no offense. anyway, dane got fired, presumably by his dad, which is hilarious. but! triumph of triumphs, i have heard dane has regained a position with the facility. he is now a porter for the restaurant he used to run (the worst part of).
that was dane.
