A Face that Fits

Everything Mike Stanley touched was worse for the contact. It had always been this way.

They say, “into every life a little rain must fall” and Mike was a one-man rain cloud. An off-key note in the melody of your day.

If you confronted him with this observation, admittedly a rather cruel one on the face of it, he would look back at you with an expression of total incomprehension. After all what made him so bad? Was he not a man just trying to navigate the world as best he could like everyone else?

Sure, he might admit that the world, as it were, did not seem to particularly enjoy his presence. He was always finding himself in situations where the atmosphere could be described as hostile at best, and at worst it was downright murderous. But that wasn’t his fault, right? Maybe something about him just rubbed people up the wrong way. He had been told on occasions too numerous to count that he had a face that pleaded to be punched. Maybe he was just profoundly unlucky, always encountering people at just their absolute worst time.

If that was the case, what could he reasonably be expected to do he might ask. He tried his best to be considerate.

When Mike takes the bus, he doesn’t sit glassy eyed, with his earphones in, expertly oblivious to those around him. No, he doesn’t hoard his music all to himself, he shares it by blaring it straight from his phone. At full volume. Playing his carefully curated playlist that he himself finds very soothing. I say playlist but it is in fact just the one song playing on repeat. The year 2000 monster hit “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

Mike knows people in work, they hate Mondays. Famously Mondays are the worst day of the week for them. So Mike, in his consideration, if he has something that could wait until Monday, he doesn’t let it sit idle, only to have it fall on them on their least favorite of days. No! He jumps into action, and he sets up meetings at 4:30pm on a Friday. He invites everyone who could possibly be expected to need to attend these meetings and he marks these requests as urgent. You better believe it.

Sure, sometimes the meetings go late, way late. Partially because Mike always has some additional questions to make sure they don’t leave anything for those dreaded Mondays. He stays focused in these meetings as well, you can count on that. If he’s speaking, he says insightful things such as “lets circle back to this point later” and “lets think about not just who is accountable but also who is responsible.” When he’s not speaking he clicks his pen every couple of seconds just to make sure he doesn’t lose his focus.

When he’s not working Mike is a keen cinema goer. There’s nothing he loves more than really getting immersed in a good film. What really bothers him though is when he recognizes one of the actors, but he just can’t quite place them. What else are they in? he asks himself. Man is that ever annoying, it’s like having something stuck in your teeth, you just can’t leave it alone. So Mike he’ll take out his phone and he’ll just do a quick google to figure out who he’s looking at. Then to make sure his fellow patrons aren’t also suffering under the same frustration, Mike will just call out to the whole theatre, “she was in the Sopranos” or “it’s the kid from Mrs. Doubtfire.” 

He worries that even when he does remember why an actor looks familiar, it’s possible that not everyone does so just to be safe he shouts out pretty much what everyone in the film has been in before, every time they come on screen. Surely this should be seen as a generous act of providing a free public service, but it is safe to say that it is definitively not. Usually, Mike is thrown out in the first hour and he is permanently banned from half dozen cinemas in his local area. Some people just don’t recognize a favor even when it’s being yelled at them in a dimly lit room.

As a result, Mike has had to watch the end of a great many movies alone in his flat. That’s ok though because it means he can multi-task while practicing some of his hobbies such as tap dancing, moving his furniture around to find the perfect arrangement to fit his mood, and mimicking the cries of exotic birds. Mike prefers it when he has a roommate in the flat and there have been many over the years. None have stayed for long though, something Mike attributes to his extremely aggressive neighbors who will coming banging on his door over any tiny thing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly Mike doesn’t have many friends, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get the odd courtesy invite to a social event. On those occasions he rises early and sets off sometimes seven or even eight hours before the event. This serves two purposes, the first is that Mike is a very careful driver. This care manifests itself in usually driving approximately half of the speed limit on any given road or highway. Naturally it adds quite a bit of time to his journey, but he is pleased to ensure that he, and all the drivers cheering behind him with their horns, arrive safely at the destination.

 The second reason for setting off early is the Mike likes to arrive hours before he’s expected. How pleasant it must be for the host to know that there is no chance of nobody attending because the first guest has already arrived while things are being set up.

Once the event is in full swing Mike does his bit to contribute to the atmosphere by engaging in sparkling conversation. He does this by speaking at length about the topics which interest him most, and therefore the subject matter he feels he can be most illuminating to those fellow guests he has held captive by the social niceties that prevent them from walking away from him midsentence. Indeed, he goes to great length to ensure he is almost always midsentence as he preaches about the importance of owning more than one pair of brown shoes, pontificates on some of his most recent dreams and what they might mean, or proselytizes about how people say the weather is unseasonable when in fact it is within the expected range of norms.

He has found that if there is food available and he stops to chew people will invariably flee in the brief respite from his conversational assault. Therefore, he no longer stops to chew, rather he continues to speak at ever increasing volumes while simultaneously chewing loudly.

As he leans in, to yell into the ear of a distressed looking young women about his favorite ringtone settings, visible chunks of half masticated cocktail sausage rain down on her like shrapnel. Each audible smack of his lips brings a flinch from his party hostages and if you look very closely there’s the ever so subtle hint of not quite a smile. No, smile would certainly not be the right word, a smirk perhaps. Or perhaps he just has one of those faces.