Mr. Press

Note: For any number of reasons, I'm not going to be talking about any individual people I've met since I've been here. Except in special cases.

I first noticed Rick long before I got to Taiwan. Someone found a list of all of our training group's email addresses, and invited all of us to a facebook group. Rick ran with it. He tried to friend everyone, and I accepted (reluctantly, mostly just because I was trying to be as friendly as I could be). He only wrote on my wall once. I didn't respond to it, because he didn't say anything of much substance. I saw that when people responded to him, he would reciprocate, to an extreme degree. On the group, he would fill 3, 4, 5 boxes at once in discussions. He was very active.

When I checked in to the hotel, I saw that I was rooming with him and thought "Oh, fantastic." When I met him, I shook his hand, and we started talking. He was walking ahead of me while we were talking, and found himself walking into a corner because he was too distracted to watch where he was going.

Some highlights of the first conversation:

(Keep in mind, THE FIRST CONVERSATION)

"I probably said goodbye to my father for the last time"

"Why's that?"

"He has cancer, and I just figure that by the time I get back, he'll be dead."

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"I wanted to get away. I caught the girl I was with cheating on me with a rich guy."

I remember he also threw in something about a pregnancy scare with her, but I can't quite recall it. So early in our relationship, and I was already tuning him out.

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"There's a girl I'm wanting to meet here. She's a model for guitars and I play guitars, so its like perfect, you know?"

I wasn't special. He talked like this with pretty much everyone he met. Keep in mind, 60 people, not including the trainers. That's a lot of first impressions, which he was the king of, mostly because your first impression of him was exactly what you would get at any other time. For one lucky individual, he even threw in the fact that the pregnancy scare involved him slipping a morning after pill into his (I think) ex-wife's coffee. Luckily, it didn't take, as she was pregnant, and subsequently lost the baby.

Nearly every night he would stay up until 2, 3, 4 in the morning talking on the computer to women he met through myspace or facebook. After a while, this got REALLY annoying, especially because he would talk to me too. Even when I had headphones in. He would just talk. I don't think it mattered if I was there.

He would talk about pretty much 2 things: 1) The women he wanted to hook up with and 2) how much he hated Hess. Sometimes the two would mix, like when we were getting called by our branch bosses. These were important calls, and we were required to be in our rooms when we got them, as our bosses are busy enough as it is, and we needed to talk about how life would be when we left training. Tragically, he had arranged to meet up with the guitar girl on the exact night he needed to be in the room. He said he got into an argument with the trainers over this.

He showed up for the first day of training in a bright orange buttoned shirt and crushed velvet blazer.

He had already made plans to live with one of the guys he became pretty good friends with over facebook. About 3 days after they met, the other guy decided he'd rather live alone.

He walked behind a guy into the bathroom and as the guy went into the stall and turned around to close the door, Rick stood there and said "So, whats up?" There wasn't anything dirty meant by that. That's just how he said hi.

Apparently he built a lot of his personality by living in Amsterdam. By living, I mean living on the streets, playing guitar. There's a mythical YouTube video of him playing the Baywatch theme song -badly- on the streets of Amsterdam. He once raised his hand during training to point out that he had found a David Hasselhoff CD in his bag. That's all.

Right before one of our demos, most people had stayed up late working planning their first times teaching and everyone was nervous, one of the trainers asked if anyone in the group had a good joke to break the mood with. Rick was the only one who raised his hand. His joke: Teaching is a lot like sex. In the beginning, its awkward and robotic and might not feel very good, but the more you do it, the better it feels. That's all. Yeah, I was the only one laughing. If anyone ever wants to know my sense of humor, its moments like that.

I spent maybe 2 hours on each of my demos and I did fine. Rick worked on his pretty late in the night and even after he woke up and was horrific. I quote one of his group members as saying the observer "ripped Rick apart" in his second one. Apparently, he would just go up and spend time talking about his time in Amsterdam, often in terms not so appropriate for the classroom. He defended himself by saying when he had taught before "it was a lot more freeform." He said that a lot.

On the nights before the demos, I heard varying reports of him walking up to people who were working on theirs and interrupting them with complaints about Hess, not following Maslow's hierarchy of needs and giving us more time off (a typhoon gave us one more day off than we should have had), and how he had to be at the hotel to work on the demo when "I could be having awesome sex right now."

After his second demo, Rick was pulled out of the room by the trainers. I could see him talking with them outside. He looked back inside at no one in particular and smiled while giving a thumbs-down. Someone announced to the group at the end of the day that Rick had asked to leave (other people left early with no mention). We got outside and Rick said he was pissed because it certainly wasn't his decision to leave. Hess gave him that night to stay in the hotel and a pre-made letter with suggestions of where he could stay and where he could work if he didn't want to leave Taiwan (I love the strategy- he sucks here, so send him to the competition).

I know what it feels like to be the one outsider in a large group, and I hate all the times when I've fucked up and nobody wants to speak truth to me and let me know what the problem is, so that night I broke my silent treatment to him and let him know in no uncertain terms just where he rubbed people the wrong way (understatement). He was receptive, and hopefully he remembered later, in whatever he did. I just thought it odd that I was lecturing someone six years older than me, but I guess I really am an expert in some things.

The next morning, I woke him up to let him know the head of Hess HR was at the door to talk to him about getting his documents back to him. As we were leaving training that day, someone let me know he was outside the Hess building. My first thought: Is he yelling? My second thought: Does he have his stuff with him? (I was eager to get the room to myself) He said he was just there to say goodbye to some people in the group who were nice to him. And that's where I left him. Sadly, my last thought upon leaving him was 'There, but for the grace of God, go I.'

People have asked me what happened to him. I wish I knew. He said he was going to move into the hostel across the street from the hotel, but that was weeks ago. He deleted his facebook account, which might mean only good things.