This Twitter thread about a chowder-slurping co-worker from hell is a thing of rare beauty
Aux Features Aux
Joy is a tricky thing, a rare and precious flower growing in the unlikeliest of places. Sometimes, it can be found in the scintillating mosaic of dew drops on the morning grass. At other times, in the simple majesty of a jaw-dropping sunset. And sometimes, dear readers, joy arrives in our lives in the form of a man slurping down chowder in an overheated movie theater projection booth, thinking about swords, and sitting near a sign that says “Matt isn’t allowed to speak about Star Wars.”
All of which is to point your attention toward the best novel we’ve read in months, i.e., the above Twitter thread from @KLobstar, recounting their long and storied experiences with “Matt,” a co-worker at an unnamed movie theater chain who sounds like the most amazing person on the planet, provided you do not have to be in speaking, smelling, or thinking range of him. The thread has (rightly) gone viral this weekend, and you really owe it to yourself to check it out; it’s a bit like A Confederacy Of Dunces, if Ignatius J. Reilly was overly obsessed with hacking his friends’ MySpace accounts, a wide variety of petty thefts, and getting into actual duels with the guy who runs the Magic shop at the mall.
And honestly, we’d post more excerpts, but we’re only really even writing this as a sort of public service announcement, telling you to go consume the complete thread yourself; you will be happier having met Matt, we assure you, and happier still, at the conclusion of the thread, that you do not know Matt more.
34 Comments
Clam Chowdaaaah!https://youtu.be/4_TNpsX-8-8
Show-dair
Glad someone else remembers that. Maybe because I can relate.
“…hot ocean milk with dead animal croutons”
the chowder really should have been a clue it was actually the Bad Place
“… savory latte with bugs in it.”
I’m pretty sure “Matt” doesn’t exist but if he does, I wanna party with that guy.
Yeah, this seems like a pretty classic case of “None of this actually happened.” He actually spliced nude pics into kids’ movies, just like Fight Club but he got the idea from Fight Club but he actually did it lol
I dunno, it seems legit.“Why is everyone but Matt putting in overtime?”“Well, sir, everyone keeps putting in for overtime because Matt keeps splicing sexually explicit frames into children’s movies”“Oh. Sure. Carry on.”
People like Matt really do exist. I knew one guy who was really, really, really, odd. Somebody pointed me to an old geocities web page that his roommates had made about him when he was in college. It was all stuff like this and I believed every word. He’s a doctor, by the way.
I worked in a mall shop in the 90’s. In my grown up career, I’ve dealt with thousands of members of the general public. I have no problem whatsoever believing that Matt absolutely existed.
Jesus Christ. This (fictional) person is the kind you murder, not party with. Ffs.
There are thousands of people in this country who believe batshit QAnon
conspiracy theories — including that many celebrities are lizard people,
replete with what they believe is photographic proof of them morphing — yet you don’t believe THIS guy exists?
I’ve worked with plenty of people like Matt. I worked with a guy (pushing 40) who would come into work with cocaine still crusted to his nostril from the weekend and he would point it out. Like he didn’t shower or wash his face so we could see his cocaine crust, so we would all think he was cool.
I definitely believe this is real. Most of the details are too specific, stupid, and trivial to be invented. The more outlandish ones are few, and they aren’t far from the details of some of the crazy lunatics I’ve roomed or worked with. I couldn’t craft a thread as epic as this one, but if you pieced together my two worst college roommates and my one worst coworker, you’d just about have this thread. (Key deets: roommate #1 threw a Mother’s Day card at his own mother in a rage on the day I helped him move out; roommate #2 was a chronic confabulator who pretended to sell furs to Van Halen and claimed to have an art collection worth millions that he would periodically destroy pieces from for the insurance money; and the coworker got himself fired by showing up six hours late, in a tie—we worked the counter at a guitar store, so the tie was weird—and presenting a bargain-basement 3D animation of his “vision” for the store to our manager, who subsequently confided he was worried the guy would come back and murder all of us).
My worst roommates have a lot of the time been coworkers as well, which is just brutal. In one case from hell, this particular gem of a guy was drunk/coked out and banging on my door to borrow a lighter. This is a legitimate reason for an adult to pretend like they’re sleeping, which I did, until I noticed what sounded like someone pissing on my door. Don’t get me wrong – nice guy, he did clean it up. He tried to blame it on the dog that never leaves the upstairs, and the next day, told our boss that he was tired because I kept him up all night getting drunk. He’s long fired and evicted at this point, but sadly it took a lot more than that.
“Any way, that Matt, what a card. My girlfriend who is a model—she lives in Canada, you don’t know her—told me to post this on Twitter. She always loves hearing about Matt. She told me that even if my penis wasn’t over a foot long, she’d still date me just to hear my Matt stories.”
I believe it. All of it. If the guy’s name was Mike, I’d know exactly who he was talking about.We all know this guy. The Mike that I knew always talked like he was reciting the most dramatic moments in a Bruckheimer film. Mike said he was fired from a Dollar General security job for catching too many criminals. After graduation this slim white Jewish kid beefed up and got a tan and decided he looked Hispanic, and then he decided he was Hispanic. Vaya con Dios, Mike my friend. I hope somebody is documenting your life for posterity.
“Mike said he was fired from a Dollar General security job for catching too many criminals.”This seems like a key difference, though. In your case, Mike is claiming to have done something that you know was clearly bullshit and never happened. In the Twitter guy’s thread, he’s the one claiming to have witnessed things that are (often) clearly bullshit and never happened. The Twitter guy is basically your Mike, but with the additional (boring) step of making the stories about a third party instead of himself.
One of the lyingest people I’ve ever known was named Mike. I went to college with him, and he had an endless stream of experiences and anecdotes about interesting things that had allegedly happened to him.The most interesting story was one that he unfolded in front of several other people… completely forgetting that it had actually happened to one of them and he’d appropriated it as his own.
Hey! We must be in the same graduating class. My lying college Mike lauded himself as a brilliant poet and I realized what an ass he was when he ripped off an entire stanza word for word from our mutual roommate who had recently died. He wasn’t that weird OR deep, no matter what the 3/4 afro projected.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1329777440173002757.htmlFor if you, like me, hate reading long Twitter threads in their original form.
So, to summarize: “Matt” damaged property, both the theater’s and others’, Matt got caught committing petty crimes, Matt made violent statements, Matt chronically underperformed at work or outright did not work, and Matt did things that would open the business up to civil suits (like recording the films).
I get that a small local movie theater isn’t exactly the pinnacle of professional responsibility, but the question remains: Why was Matt never fired despite an apparent pattern of being destructive, dangerous, a legal liability, and not even remotely performing his job?
/assuming this is in fact real
If it had two projectionists who worked simultaneously and was in a mall, it’s more likely that was a large multiplex that belonged to major chain.That only amplifies the question “why wasn’t he fired?”
I believe “Mike” is an amalgamation of various coworkers that drift in
and out of a business. Having all of this concentrated in a single
person
doesn’t add up. The thread neglects to mention anything that could shield someone from reality like being the manager’s kid or coming from a wealthy family.I can relate to encountering awful people, but real people are not consistently bad at everything, all of the time.
The poster notes that Matt was the owner’s nephew in the thread comments.
He was autistic or something, that’s what I gather
That’s just Screenwriting 101.“Hey, Bill. I need this character to do something frankly unbelievable over and over for the plot to work.”“Well, Akiva, if you give the character some mental or neurological disability, all the dumb fuckers in the audience will lap it up and think they’re being charitable at the same time.”
Yeah, I can see that, and it could very well be true. I just had the feeling, reading through the thread, that maybe the person wasn’t all there.
Busted!If you trashed a film, you quickly would call the film depot and get a replacement If it happened frequently. Maybe the studio would bark at the film buyer of the chain. Replacement print would usually run $1200 but nobody was ever charged.So no. NO studio would send an investigative team. Hell if it was a hit film the studio would send an extra print to major multiplexes just in case, ready if such an emergency occured.
Dear Matt:
A) That thread was way too long2) There are no Inspector Clouseaus in real life. They would have fired that guy quickly.
Ehn, if Matt was somebody’s nephew it’s entirely plausible he’d never be fired so long as his fuck-ups didn’t get anybody killed. I mean, this was before the Great Recession. Finding good help wasn’t that easy.
All of which is to point your attention toward the best novel we’ve read in months, i.e., the above Twitter thread from @KLobstar, Was it? You really need to read more then.