{"id":142574,"date":"2020-12-28T03:23:33","date_gmt":"2020-12-28T00:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/what-i-started-to-learn-at-18\/"},"modified":"2020-12-28T03:23:33","modified_gmt":"2020-12-28T00:23:33","slug":"what-i-started-to-learn-at-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/what-i-started-to-learn-at-18\/","title":{"rendered":"#What I started to learn at 18"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#What I started to learn at 18<\/strong>”
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One Christmas in the mid-1990s, I managed the holiday-music section at a suburban Tower Records. The time went by in a blur \u2014\u00ad but if I could go back and give my teenage self some advice, I would say: Relax and Merry Christmas!\u00a0<\/p>\n

At 18, I was having a midlife crisis. Working the overnight shift at the supermarket for the extra dollar an hour gave me time to read all the news<\/a>papers and magazines we stocked. I was the best-informed person in town.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I needed a cooler job \u2014 and what would be cooler than working at the coolest music store in the world? No, the Cambridge and Boston Towers weren\u2019t hiring .\u2009.\u2009. but the Tower Records in suburban Burlington was hiring an administrative assistant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So I took two bus transfers to Burlington. There was the highway strip<\/a> mall that Tower anchored \u2014 and a short, thin, nervous man named Eric pacing outside with a cigarette, waiting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I had asked a couple of people at the supermarket what music I should mention if my prospective boss asked about \u201cgood music,\u201d so I was waiting with my answers about Charlie Parker and Nine Inch Nails.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Eric was only interested in one thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He walked me in past the sales floor to a locked vault in the middle of the store, pointed to a calculator on the counter and asked, \u201cDo you know how to use the adding machine?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sure. I had always used the adding machine at the supermarket, because they shut down the cash registers from 1 to 6 a.m. He handed me a stack of receipts. \u201cCan you put these in?\u201d he said. I started and finished the pile.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTed will like you,\u201d Eric said, pulling out more random stacks of receipts from multiple drawers. Ted, the Burlington store manager, was supposed to have been sending a monthly sales tally to Tower world headquarters in Sacramento.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I got the job. The music people treated me with a strange deference: the girl who knows nothing about music but knows how to use the adding machine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I spent little time on the sales floor and most of my time in Ted\u2019s office or the vault \u2014 processing health-insurance forms, making the weekly shift schedule for workers, supervising the cash counts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Until Christmas. It wasn\u2019t even Thanksgiving, but Eric was panicking. The seasonal Christmas manager had quit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I would do it, I said. Who even cared about Christmas music? How hard could it be? Maybe we\u2019d sell one or two albums a day, and I\u2019d refill them in between counting the Ticketmaster cash till.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From Black Friday to Christmas Eve, I worked around the clock.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We had neglected to order any Mariah Carey \u2014 and Mariah Carey was about to be the Christmas hit of the century. We had ordered boxes and boxes of Alvin and the Chipmunks, but nobody wanted those. The Columbia Records salesman rush-ordered me boxes of Mariah, delivering them in his sports car.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the meanwhile, I had to shout up from the carpet to the customers, as I rooted around for Perry Como and Tony Bennett, \u201cSorry, we\u2019re out of Mariah, but can I interest you in the Chipmunks?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I did work overnight shifts \u2014 in addition to day shifts \u2014 in the week before Christmas. Who knew what a mess our affluent Route-128-corridor tech workers could make of my neatly arranged section, with \u201cChristmas in Vienna II\u201d carefully layered on top of \u201cA Very Special Christmas?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t help but wonder who these customers were \u2014 people who could plunk down $15.99 (almost four hours of pay for me!) for a new release \u2014 without thinking about it. I had no idea what they did in the office buildings that lined our highway.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I moved on. Ted got me a job in the New Orleans store \u2014 where I was demoted to clerk, because I was only part time .\u2009.\u2009. going to college.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tower stores are gone now, having fallen victim to, first, big-box stores that offered Mariah for $10.99 instead of $15.99 and, later, to online file sharing \u2014 something even the people who understood the adding machine couldn\u2019t conceive of. But every time I hear \u00adMariah belt out \u201cAll I Want for Christmas,\u201d or the Chipmunks sing their \u201cAll I Want for Christmas,\u201d I think of my Christmas at Tower.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor of City Journal.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Twitter<\/a>: @NicoleGelinas<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#What I started to learn at 18” One Christmas in the mid-1990s, I managed the holiday-music section at a suburban Tower Records. The time went by in a blur \u2014\u00ad but if I could go back and give my teenage self some advice, I would say: Relax and Merry Christmas!\u00a0 At 18, I was having…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":142575,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/12\/tower-records.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[87914,66,158,5069,39579,4965],"class_list":["post-142574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-12-27-20","tag-christmas","tag-culture","tag-economy","tag-music","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}