On Saturday, I went to a party hosted by a friend of mine named Chris. I’m barely a sentence into this post but I’m gonna take a little tangent. The listed start time of the shin-dig was 7:30pm. I got there at 9pm thinking I’d be fashionably late. It turns out I was the first person to arrive. I hate when that happens.
Anyways, it didn’t take long for other guests to arrive. Several of them showed up in a single group. I hadn’t met these people before. One girl in the group looked vaguely and strangely familiar. Usually people whom I sorta recognize fall into two groups: people who take my fast food order or porn. She didn’t seem to fit into either of those groups. As the mystery girl busied herself with making drinks for her friends, I came up to her and introduced myself. How do I know you, I asked. She said she didn’t know but that she and my friend met each other on a dating web site. That seemed like a somewhat plausible explanation as I peruse dating web sites but it didn’t seem like the correct reason why she seemed familiar. I let Jackie (not her real name) get back to her drinks and I returned to refresh my plate with Pizza Pops.
Some time later, I sat down next to Jackie with others and she told everyone where she worked:
“I’m a graphic designer and I work PricewaterhouseCoopers.”
“Wait, do you work at 250 Howe St.”?
“Yeah, I work on the second floor.”
I instantly knew where I recognized Jackie from. A long time ago, like perhaps four years ago when things were much better in the world, my beloved skate team and I were still working at Black Box downtown, at 250 Howe Street. One day I was going up to my floor and I got into one of the elevators, which was crowded. It was full of Black Box people and also accountants from PwC. Before the doors closed, a young lady got into car with us. She didn’t look like an accountant because she was dressed more casually than the bean counters. She hit the button for the second floor. Someone must have pissed her off because she turned around to the full elevator car and said:
“Yeah, I’m taking the elevator up to the second floor, what are you gonna do about it?!?!?!!?”
The bold nature of her confrontation with the rest of us surprised me. I must admit I believed her to be a bit mentally unstable at the time. I thought she might have been having a bad day. The elevator was silent as the doors opened to the second floor and she stormed out. As the elevator returned to its ascent, they were looks of shock and some comments made at what she had said. I wondered who this crazy girl was and what was her story. I saw her several more times in the elevator after that but there were no more outbursts. My curiosity about her remained though. Alas, when EA forced us to retreat to the wastelands of Burnaby, we no longer had contact with the accountants.
Returning to the present, I immediately told Jackie why I had recognized her as soon as she arrived. I recounted the whole story to her and others within earshot. She laughed at the incident which may or may not have to do with the fact she was extremely intoxicated at the time. Back then I took her to be perhaps someone with a stick up her butt but Jackie was actually a fun person to talk to during the party.
The moral of this post is that sometimes mysteries do get solved, you just might have to wait years for that to happen.
I think you have the first 20 pages for a Jake Gyllenhaal/Zooey Deschanel romantic comedy script right there.
I think on page 40 of the script Jake’s character holds an MP3 player over his head outside her window.