I fantasized that the blank page would scare me today. It didn’t. I slid into my leather chair, opened the lid, and typed these two sentences. I’m at the end of them, the two sentences, that is. I’m not sure where I should go after this paragraph, or even after this sentence. Maybe I’ll stay a while here, hang around this paragraph, add extraneous words and mindless thoughts. You know, to get the proverbial juices flowing. I’m not sure which proverb the juices flow from, but I’m sure the proverb doesn’t miss them.

Ah, the second paragraph beckoned. I wasn’t sure I was going to move here, but here I moved before I gave it a second look. And now I’m here and I’m thinking the story must move forward. I haven’t even introduced myself. That’s rather common for me. I start in on the babbling and not moving forward and wasting time by talking about filled paragraphs, and I forget to introduce myself.

I’ve been trying to follow a formula I learned at public speaking training at work. When he arrived at how to tell a story, the instructor was very proud of his formula. He had never seen this formula anywhere. For all he knew, and he told us everything he knew, he had invented it. I don’t think he did invent it, but he was proud of it and we weren’t to tell him otherwise. He was a nice old man and it wouldn’t be nice of us to disillusion us. At least not right there in front of everyone. And for all I know he did invent it. He was old enough to have done so.

He instructed us this way. There are four easy steps to tell a story: step 1: choose a character. That’s easy. I’m the character. You may call me Harold, if you have to call me anything at all. I’m a forty-two year old office worker with a bit of a gambling problem. It’s those darn video poker machines everywhere. The state lottery installed them in bars and supermarkets, and I find myself in front of the screens, pounding away at the buttons even if I have only a few minutes of extra time here and there.

There’s much more about me that I’m not sharing, of course. There’s my upbringing in the broken house where the ceiling was literally falling in on me. Literally. As in I would wake up most mornings with plaster in my hair. You wouldn’t know it to look at most ceilings, but there’s enough plaster up there to last a long time, long enough to sprinkle white powder across a person’s hair for twenty years. It might have had something to do with our upstairs neighbors. They banged a lot on their floor. I didn’t know what it was until I was much older, of course. They were fiends. After all that banging you would think that the ceiling would eventually give way wholesale and fall on top of me. It never did. It didn’t even give way enough to form holes through which my adolescent self could peak through and learned a bit about this and a bit about that. I’d have to wait many years to learn about that. But at least I didn’t know what I was missing for many years afterwards. It would have given me a leg up, so to speak. It might even have made up for the broken house. It’s hard to say, to measure such dissimilar things and see if they’d balance out. Looking back it’s easy to say it would have. The plaster was so bad in high school that my first girlfriend was convinced my hair was turning gray. I think it was a turn on for her, what with me being the older guy and everything. She was actually older than me. She dumped me at the prom to go out with a real older guy. He was visiting from college for a break and that’s when she broke up with me. It was a lonely prom.

I didn’t think I had that much about me in me. I’m a rather boring person normally. I guess this is a abnormal situation. I didn’t mean to spend so much time in step 1 as I have three more steps I haven’t even touched yet. Step 2 is to choose a goal. The instructor didn’t indicate this, but the goal really shouldn’t be obvious. It would be easy for me to say that my goal was to quit gambling before I lost my proverbial shirt off my hairless back. You got to love those proverbs and clean backs. I’m rather proud of at least my back. No, I’m not going with such an obvious and healthy goal as quitting gambling. I like gambling and gambling likes me. Not in that it gives me much money, but in that it helps me pass time when I’m idling in traffic. That’s the mental traffic not the physical type. I haven’t driven in a long time. My eyes aren’t so good and they don’t let me drive much. I sometimes sneak out onto the road as they haven’t taken my driver’s license. It’s not renewed or anything, but I still have it. They tried to take it last time I failed the eye exam, but I left in a huff. That’s another story.

My goal is I want to quit my job. I do IT infrastructure management in a small chair in a small desk in a small cubicle in a small department in a small company in a small town in a small country. Well, the country isn’t really small. I got a bit carried away. But the rest of it is small. Very small. And I work for a very small man. He’s a close talker and he has terrible breath. I’m convinced he gargles with mothballs before he comes to work each morning. I’ve worked there eight years and I haven’t moved from my small chair. My boss hired me and he hasn’t moved much either. I’ve wanted to quit for most of those eight years. I was fresh out of college when I joined and I thought I was going places and the company was going places. I worked very hard to try to prove myself. I don’t remember if my boss had the bad breath initially, or he acquired it over time. The years blend together after awhile. I thought I would eventually look for something better but I didn’t. So that’s my goal: quit my job. I haven’t really given it much thought beyond that.

That brings me to step 3. This is the crucial step. This is where the drama and choice and story-ness really come in. I’m Harold, the forty-two year old systems integrator and I want to quit my job. The thing is—and step 3 is always the thing—the thing is the boss is my wife’s father. You see, step three is the obstacle that is stopping the hero (that’s me) from achieving his goal. I married after college and my father-in-law got me the job. He saw potential in me, and he wanted me to provide for his beautiful daughter. And she was beautiful back then. She was a poet. Her body was so long that it took me hours to work my eyes from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. Trust me, I used to do that a lot. When we first married, I would stare and stare, and she would ask me what I was doing, and when I told her I was trying to measure he length, she would always laugh. She was not only long, she was long and beautiful, and I wanted to do anything to please her.

After I came out of school she agreed to marry me. I asked her father if it was okay, and he assured me it was under one condition. I would have to get a real job. When my wife introduced me to him during college, he nicknamed me hippy. Now before you get the wrong idea, I’m not a hippy. I don’t have long hair or particularly liberal beliefs. I certainly don’t believe in tie-die shirts or pacifism or strangely named ice cream. It was just he thought all college kids were hippies. He didn’t go to college and started working at the small company at a very young age. He worked his way up through the small company until he ran their infrastructure department. Now, he didn’t know much about telephones or networks or later computers, but he had been there a long time and that’s where he ended up. When a person ends up somewhere after long years, it’s hard to move them. It’s like a caramel bar that you lose in a couch. Over time it melts and molds itself into the metal frame of the couch and you kind of forget it’s there and it becomes part of the couch. You probably can’t even think of the couch without thinking of the caramel bar. You certainly don’t want to touch it, what with the stickiness and the sugar and the strange syrupy behavior it would exhibit.

So I agreed that I would get a job before I married his daughter, and look for a job I did. We wanted to be married before September, and I spent the entire summer going in and out of one dead-end job after the next. It was 1986 and the world was a different place than it is today. The jobs weren’t there for a recent college graduate with no aim and no experience and no connections. Well, I did have one connection. And so I went to work for him. I installed phone jacks and plugged in typewriters and did the stuff that makes offices work for small companies. It wasn’t bad in the beginning, as I said. I married and I was happy and life was as good as I ever thought it was going to get.

Then my wife became pregnant and the world changed. We were so excited and so focused on the baby that I started not to pay attention at work much. I started goofing off, reading books about babies and marriages and what I really wanted to be when I grew up. My father-in-law didn’t like that I wasn’t taking my job seriously anymore. He spent thirty years at the small company and he wanted me to take my work as seriously as he took his work because I was doing his work. Then the baby came along and I told my wife that I wanted to stop working for her father, and strike out on my own, get a job that really fit who I was. At the time, though, I still didn’t know who I was. I was a new father with a large rent and a used station wagon that my parents bought for us when our little bundle of joy arrived. I couldn’t afford the time to find myself. We discussed it and then she spoke with her father, and six years later I found myself in the same job in the same chair writing about the four-step approach to telling a story that I learned in a small conference room in a small training class.

And that brings me to step 4 in the storytelling process. After you have a character and a goal and an obstacle, you need a conclusion. What happens to the character? Does he overcome his obstacle to achieve his goal? I won’t be able to illustrate this last step because I’m still sitting here, thinking about how I’m going to tell my father-in-law that it’s over. That I love his daughter and his granddaughter, and except for his bad breath and his small stature, I don’t mind him much, but I can’t stand working for him in his small office at his small company. Maybe I’ll tell him later. I have a few minutes to kill now. I’m going to run over to the local bar and see how my luck stands today.