here's a story

The other day I brought up the “what if” person in my life. So here’s my story of my what if guy…

From ages 16-18 I worked at the local hospital in the housekeeping department. It was actually an excellent job to have while in school; I mostly worked weekends + 4 hours during the week. About 8 months after I started working there my (favorite) supervisor got her stepson hired doing the “trash run” (basically he would go around the hospital collecting the trash and also getting rid of the biohazard trash as well). Randy was his name.

There were 4 of us who did regular cleaning schedules – 1st, 2nd, 3rd floors and the OB and ICU departments. 2 of the girls i worked with (Angie and Jane) were pretty nice; they were (usually) friendly and good workers. The other – her name was Andrea – was a regular bitch on wheels. She’d been there for a year or so before I started and thought her shit didn’t stink. The head supervisor made Andrea assistant supervisor, meaning she could walk through our floors/schedules to make sure we were cleaning properly. Andrea loved this 🙄

Maybe I’m a little biased because she tried riding my ass for a couple of weekends for no apparant reason. [shrug]

Anyway, Randy had trouble from the time he started. At lunch on his first day he tried talking to Angie. She thought he was hitting on her and told Andrea (whom I guess she was fairly good friends with). Andrea immediately started making fun of Randy – his height (he’s not a very tall guy), his hair, you name it. Angie and Jane thought this was hysterical, and for the rest of that weekend they made fun of him behind his back and make snide remarks as he’d walk away. I never joined in; I only wanted to rip them all a new one for being such bitches. I remember walking out after work his first Sunday and seeing him sitting in his truck with his head in his hands 😦

I’ll be honest here and say that at the very beginning I wasn’t sure if I should talk to him because I didn’t want to be ostracized by the others, too. When you’re 16 sometimes the obvious right choice isn’t so clear right away.

Anyway, it didn’t take long before I (mentally) told the girls to shove it and started talking to him; at first because I wanted to show the other girls that I wasn’t Andrea’s sheep; later, because he was a genuinely nice guy and we seemed to have a lot in common – we were both shorter, were really nearsighted, kind of off-beat, etc. Plus we made each other laugh by making fun of our (not so favorite) supervisor, whom we nicknamed “Drill Sargent”.

I had never really talked to guys before I met Randy; they always seemed like huge question marks to me, some mystifying creatures. I was so shy that it made it all but impossible to even be friends with a guy. But Randy was so easy to talk to, and he seemed so different from the guys at school who all seemed to be either totally immature or completely stupid.

Can you guess what came next? Yeah, within a few weeks I realized I was developing feelings for him. The “revelation” moment came one morning before our shift started. We were sitting in the storeroom listening to someone tell a funny story. We laughed at the punchline and our eyes met briefly, and it was. . . .totally cliche lol 😛 My heart beat faster, I felt hot all over. It was wonderful.

Even more cliche was the fact that he was dating someone at the time. We talked about his girlfriend occasionally; he told me once about a nice razor she gave him. I hated the fact that she got to be with him and I didn’t but I was glad that she seemed to make him happy.

Our conversations never got very deep but he seemed to enjoy talking to me. Sometimes he would tease me, and a few times our eyes would meet and “we[‘d] laugh just a little too loud…we[‘d] stand just a little to close…we[‘d] stare just a little too loonnnngggg..”

*ahem*

Anyway, one of my bff’s in high school kept trying to get me to ask him to hang out, and later that spring, to ask him to go to Prom with me. And this is why Randy is my “what if?” guy. If I hadn’t been too afraid to ask him to go to Prom, I might’ve gone with him and had a much better time than I did with the guy I did end up going with. We might’ve – if nothing else – become real friends.

sigh.

One night a few weeks ago I did a search on MySpace for him, and lo and behold he actually has a page! I tried adding him as a friend, which he granted for about 18 hours, then removed me from his friend list. At first I was really hurt, but I realized that there could’ve been a lot of reasons why. I did try one more time to request him to add me, but this time the request was denied without any adding at all.

I’m kicking myself for not messaging him when I had the chance. I’ve been wanting to tell him for years how much his friendship meant to me, and how he really made a positive difference in my life. I’d like to tell him too how I’d really enjoy being friends with him again, but I’m not completely sure that would be wholly appropriate and/or freak him out.

I suppose time will tell in the end…

Posted by nerdmom on May 30, 2008

https://nerdmom.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/heres-a-story/