When there's a lull in the line and Melissa Jackson is in full force — and she's usually in full force — she waits nervously behind her register with her hands on her hips,
staring down the ambling lunchgoers.
She hopes they'll pick her register, the one on the north end of the row in The Underground food court in Wescow Hall.
For Jackson, a steward of liveliness in a monotonous world, a lunchtime transaction is a simple and happy thing.
Here comes a guy in a red shirt. He slides his tray onto the counter and she scans his card.
DON'T MISUNDERSTAND
SHE'S NOT JUST A "HAVE
A NICE" DAY, WARM SMILE,
BEST-PART-OF-WAKING-UP-
IS-FOLGERS-IN-YOUR-CUP
PERSON. SHE'S KIND
OF WEIRD.
"Have a stupendous day," she says, finishing the transaction.
He walks off, a smile remaining on his face for a few seconds before fading away.
"Why not?" she says. She pumps her fists and looks him in the eye, "Yeah! Yeah!"
His face brightens and he laughs."Stupendous?"
Melissa Jackson, Beloit junior, has been many things: a lonely cop's kid, a mama's girl, a small-town girl, a vegetarian. She's had a lip ring and now wears a nose
ring; she's had pink hair but now is a natural blonde.
At The Undergroud, the most bustling place on the KU campus at lunchtime — a place full of
PHOTO/JARED GAB
cards being swiped, change being made, long lines being stood in and people, people everywhere — she has adopted another role; she makes people smile, even if
only for a few seconds.
Don't misunderstand — she's not just a "have a nice" day, warm smile, best-part-of-waking-up-is-Folgers-in-your-cup person.She's kind of weird.It's the sort of stuff that doesn't translate to paper, but she tells customers like "What's on your pizza? I find that kind of odd," and "Six and three quarters please" and "Do I have to give you a receipt?"She's abrasive, in a fun way, she says.
And people recognize her for it. All the time. When she walks through campus or rides the bus or on the rare occasions when she goes out on the weekend, people say, "Hey, you're that girl who told me to 'have a groovy day.'" That's her trademark saying.
Is it enough to make a difference in a sea of sameness?
给新课
Let us turn our attention momentarily tothemathematical study of monotonic function.
More specifically, let's look at some statements pulled severely out of context from online encyclopedias and Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Web site:
A monotonic function is either entirely non-increasing or non-decreasing. A monotonic function preserves the order. A monotonic function never recants.
When plotted, a monotonic function can look like this:
Now perhaps you understand what Jackson is up against. A monotonic function never recants. Never.
So what does Jackson bring to the fight? Let us look to her past.
"She didn't really fit in in Beloit, Kansas," her mom, Vicki,
says, "because she walked to a beat of a different drum."
She was probably the first person in Beloit, a town of fewer than 4,000 people in north-central Kansas, to dye her hair pink, Vicki says, and probably the first to ask about vegetarian options for the school lunch menu (now she orders her veggie wrap from The Underground with a slice of turkey on top).
She got good grades and waited tables at a restaurant called Plum Creek, where she started to develop her knack for getting a rise out of customers.
She didn't go out on the weekends to party with the other kids. Her father was a policeman, and she was labeled a narc. She stayed at home and read Ayn Rand. Her mom was her best friend. In fact, she didn't receive a birthday present from a non-family member until freshman year of college when she received a gift from a friend at Watkins Scholarship Hall. This made her cry.
She once reconnected her father with his roommate from his football-playing days at Kansas State, whom she got to know in one of her conversations at the restaurant.
"Maybe it's because of spirits and angels," her mom hypothesizes. "She's in tune
with them and these things happen."
Within the doors of The Underground, where she has worked since it opened her freshman year, Jackson says strange things to people she doesn't now. But outside of those doors, she is a shy girl who keeps her room organized, washes the dishes regularly, doesn't fall behind on her homework and checks up on her roommate.
"She is a very complex person," says her roommate, Lauren Goger, Newton junior, who also works at The Underground.
When plotted, Melissa Jackson might look like this:
Armed with just a few seconds and a cash register, Jackson fights the mundane with what her supervisor, Andrea Michel-Cox, calls the "six-second conversation."
She studies her customers, noticing when a guy in a navy jacket shows up later than normal to buy his daily doughnut, or
when a girl buys soup instead of Chick-fil-A. She connects with them in small ways.
She has regulars, like Brittany Williams, New Orleans freshman, who pick her line every time.
"She's my favorite," Williams says. "She's so nice. She starts conversations with you."
And every day she connects with countless strangers who trudge through a busy lunch line and, for the first time, run into the weird girl in The Underground.
"She's beautiful," Robert Hemmelgarn, Columbia, Mo, senior, said after Jackson told him to "have a groovy day" when he went through her line for the first time last week.
For a moment, monotony is broken. Is it enough to make a difference in a sea of sameness?
"Honestly, it's just me trying to reach a part of them that's trying to shrug off a bad test or shrug off the bad weather," she says. "It seems like everyone is just kind of walking from one place to another and they don't have that human interaction."
"I think the crutch I rely on is that people will interact out of silliness, to have that interaction for no reason other than just to have it — no ulterior motive, no strings attached. Just two people wanting to smile for a minute and say, 'Hey.'"
11. 16.2006 JAYPLAY <·07