I was conflicted over the news that Pfizer is acquiring Wyeth to form a mega-pharmaceutical behemoth, and that 20,000 jobs will be adversely affected in the upcoming years due to corporate synergies. Oh, those double-edged synergies!
I managed to put aside my lingering intellectual resentment for the pharm industry, for how they profit from pumping the populace full of chemicals to treat market-driven lifestyle conditions, and feel devout sympathy for the workers who will be affected by this massive layoff. Except for one Wyeth engineer who I am meanly hoping will lose his job: Larry.
Larry was in my French Beginners Level 3 class at the adult education center last year. At the start of our first class, we were instructed to introduce ourselves to the class. Most of us strung together 2 or 3 sentences of basic personal information. Larry gave a lengthy, articulate introduction using perfect pronunciation and advanced vocabulary (that’s how I found out he was an engineer at Wyeth. It was all I understood).
“Perhaps you would like to go to a higher level?” the teacher suggested when Larry finished. In fact, she suggested it repeatedly, constantly, for the first 2 classes, but he demurred, modestly, saying he felt comfortable at this level. At first I thought he lacked self-confidence or just found the class time to be convenient to his schedule. Later, I suspected that his intentions were more sinister, that he wanted to lord his mastery of French over a bunch of beginners.
Larry proved to be very… consuming. He volunteered answers, often without raising his hand. He asked long questions in French, which the teacher repeated in English. He was always trying to take a simple lesson to the next level (like when we struggled with basic past tense, he asked questions about conditional past tense.) But wasn’t just Larry’s superior French ability that earned our contempt. It was the way he seemed genuinely perplexed and confused whenever one of us tried to speak French… just like a real French person!
Larry seemed oblivious to our annoyance. More than a few of my classmates lost patience with him. “I don’t know what he’s saying!” one kindly woman burst out one day, interrupting him as he read his homework assignment aloud (we were tasked with writing a paragraph about a current event; Larry wrote a 500-word detective story).
Believe it or not, I was one of Larry’s only allies until towards the end of the semester. Silently I loathed him, but he struck me as being innately socially awkward, maybe with Aspergers tendencies, so I refrained from shooting him nasty looks and sighing whenever he opened his mouth.
Then, one day, I was on a crowded, silent Red Line train when Larry materialized out of nowhere. “Bon soir!” he said heartily.
“Bon soir,” I said.
“Como ca va?” he said.
“Ca va bien. Et vous?” I said.
He began talking French, long sentences punctuated with little laughs and gestures. I kept nodding. Then, he asked me a question in French.
“Um, what?” I said.
He repeated it, louder and slower. I shook my hand. “Sorry, I just don’t understand,” I said.
Larry persisted with the French. It was like I wasn’t there, like he wanted a valid reason to be talking loud, insistent French on the subway. People stared at him. I stared at him. It was the longest subway ride of my life, and by the end, I wanted to punch Larry in his bouche.
I suspect Larry’s the type of guy who can’t survive a layoff, like his supervisor and co-workers have been waiting for this opportunity to unload Larry for years. C’est la vie, Larry, and bonne chance.
