I Was a Cartier Gift Wrapper
By John Knefel
The mail room at Cartier served as a crash course in New York etiquette. The only thing Aalok and Mahmood liked more than screaming at each other was screaming at the delivery men. Our UPS guy, our Fedex guy, our Brinks guys (who carried guns) were always the same dudes, and there was a locker room camaraderie they all shared – though it took a minute for me to adjust to it.
One morning I heard Mahmood greet the UPS guy by straight up telling him to fuck himself.
“Your wife tell you about the package I gave her this morning?” UPS responded without missing a beat. “Got a big ‘ol package for that sweet ass.” They never tired of “package” jokes.
Aalok, not one to be left out, started giving it to UPS man. “Even Mahmood’s ugly wife wouldn’t fuck your black ass.”
“You can kiss my black ass.”
“We’ll leave that for the new guy.”
“No thank you,” I responded idiotically.
Enter the Brinks guys, sidearms plainly visible. “Look, ladies, some of us have work to do, and unless you want a bullet in your head you’ll give me the diamonds.”
That was followed by high-fives, laughing, and various grumbles of, “Fucking Christmas, busy ass time of year.”
I watched silently, thinking, This is so cool.
As Christmas got closer and closer, the proportion of packages coming in versus those going out skewed heavily towards outgoing.
“You’ve been working out well, …”
“John.” Only five people worked in the mail room, but apparently Aalok topped out at remembering four names.
“Yes. Joe. You’ve been just fine. But as you can see, we have a lot of boxes that need to be wrapped.” He waved his arm at a stack of boxes of merchandise worth well over 5 million dollars. “And I don’t think you’re the best person for the job anymore.”
“Oh, come on, Aalok. I can gift wrap. Give me a chance.” Two months in New York, and I was begging for a chance to prove myself as a gift wrapper. The worst part was, I knew I couldn’t do it. My presents often looked like I wrapped them while riding a roller coaster. Even for items as easy as books I ended up using a half a roll of tape.
“OK, Joe. We’ll give you a chance. Beth will show you how it’s done.”
I walked further into our office bunker, into some kind of walk-in storage closet. The heat hit me like stage lights. We must have been near the central furnace that powered most of 5th Avenue, if not all of Manhattan.
“You’re Joe?” I heard through the wet air.
“John.”
Beth had been working in the Cartier storage closet for no less than 200 years, and the heat had clearly taken its toll on her appearance and temperament. Her age, wrinkles, and size – along with the fact that she was my new mentor – brought to mind the scenes from The Empire Strikes Back where Yoda trains Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi. Like the green Jedi Master, Beth wasn’t much to look at, but her skills were unassailable. The standardized gift-wrapping procedure at Cartier involved about a dozen steps, which she could literally do with her eyes closed.
“OK, you rip the paper here,” she instructed.
I grabbed the giant spool of thick paper and gave a tear.
“No, dammit, Joe, you just ripped – you just ripped it right in half. Why would you do that? Try again.”
I dabbed at my damp brow with the scrap of paper in my hand, a gesture I had hoped would be charming but more than likely came across as completely unhinged. The heat was drying my contacts out and making my hands clammy, making simple tasks like unwrapping and rewrapping boxes for practice remarkably difficult. But after a few boxes I started to get the hang of it, and I couldn’t tell who was more surprised: Beth or myself.
“How’s he doing back there?” Aalok yelled back.
“Eh, I don’t care for him, but even a moron in a hoodie could learn how to do this. It ain’t rocket science.”
“Hey Aalok,” I yelled to the front room, “tell Mahmood to send his wife back here. I could use a sponge bath.”
I poked my head into the main receiving room just in time to hear the UPS guy call Aalok’s mother a whore, and I looked forward to lunch at the deli around the corner.