8/24/97

I did not go to Kansas.

‘Round these parts, communication is a tricky thing during wartime. For whatever reason, my dad never talks to you when he’s mad at you; he tells Mom how mad he is and what he’s going to do, and then she relays the message down the line. That was how I found out I was in danger of sleeping in the streets. My dad told my mom, and my mom told me. You gotta respect a man who’ll throw you out of his house without telling you....

I decided it would be wise, under the circumstances, to search the want ads with a renewed fervor bright and early Monday morning. My mailings and follow-ups haven’t been getting me anywhere all summer, so I decided that I’d only go after the companies that wanted phone calls or in-person applications. Sure enough, I got an interview from the first people I called. Weeks of silence, only to get an interview the minute I’m getting tossed out on my ear. Is it luck? Divine intervention? Have I been doing something wrong all this time?

They must have been able to hear the desperation in my voice. I should have asked my dad to kick me out months ago.

The simple fact that I had the interview at all was victory enough for me. It didn’t matter whether I got a job from it or not. If nothing else, the fact that the interview was on Wednesday meant that I had to stay in town, and no one had any grounds for being angry with me for it. Dad was robbed of the righteousness behind his righteous indignation; the best he could muster was a look that reminded me of the end of my favorite childhood cartoons. “You’ve won this time, He-Man, but you haven’t seen the last of Skeletor!.....”

As I had hoped, it was delightful to have the house to myself, even if I did have to get up early for the job interview (11 a.m.!). Unlike last time, I was incredibly nervous about the whole thing (although I chose not to bleed on myself for a change). After all, I had a lot on my mind. My friends were all getting ready to start school again, and I was being left behind; I had stirred up a major family controversy, creating many bad feelings and jeopardizing my ability to sleep in a bed; my bills were climbing while my savings were shrinking; and I needed surgery for a not-quite-cancer on my head. That’s a lot of pressure to have going into a job interview. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t even know which company was interviewing me or what job I was being considered for. I mean, by the time you read this, I could be a hitman.

I found the place without too much trouble. It was one of those massive industrial parks, the kind of complex that has armed guards and security codes in the movies. (All I had to do in real life was drive up and find a place to park.) To get inside, I had to walk up to a lonely little phone on a lonely little table in a 10’ x 10’ waiting area and dial a person named (for the purposes of this story) Underling. This person was in Human Resources (which to me sounds like a department the German government might have had fifty years ago). Underling was to let me in and interview me.

Underling didn’t pick up the phone.

I stood there for a while and tried again. Then I sat there for a while and tried again. Then I knocked. Although there was a woman inside looking directly at me, she was obviously under strict orders not to open the door; apparently they were afraid I would come in and steal or ruin whatever it was they did in there. So I stood there for a while and tried again. I left a voice mail message and was about to leave when Underling came and opened the door.

So far, this was not the way I had pictured the interview.

I was ushered into the Human Resources area by the surprisingly diminutive Underling, who began the interview by handing me a packet of application information as thick as my arm. (In all fairness, my arm is not that thick.) Underling then went off to do other H.R. business, immediately giving me the impression that nobody really had time to talk to me. Nothing new there; I took it in stride and went to work.

Unfortunately, the packet asked a lot of the difficult questions that application forms ask, such as “What were the addresses of every place you’ve worked in the last five years? What were your supervisors’ names? Where did they live? Did they like the neighborhood?” etc. Unlike the applications I’ve been taking home all summer, I wasn’t able to look any of the information up sitting there in that H.R. office. So I did what any intelligent job-seeker would do: I made a bunch of stuff up and tried to turn the thing over to Underling.

When I turned around, Underling was not in the office. Underling stayed not in the office for twenty minutes. When somebody did come back, I had to wait another twenty minutes for somebody to go over the packet. Then I got interviewed.

The actual interview part is a blur now, partly because it turned out to be such a small part of the afternoon. I learned that the company was in charge of making and shipping out promotional merchandise and catalogs for other companies. AT&T t-shirts, Mobil ball caps, you get the picture. They wanted a guy to work vaguely in the catalog department. I could be that guy.

But first, I had to take the SAT.

When Underling brought in the SAT, I was already a little sore about the length of the interview process. Assuming that it would take ninety minutes max, I had made a date with some friends to catch an early-afternoon showing of Contact with Jodie Foster. Since one of those friends, Brian, was about to leave town for two years and study to be a Jesuit priest, I really wanted to get there on time. We were approaching the ninety-minute mark, and Underling wanted me to take an IQ test.

“This must,” I thought, “be the hardest job in the world.”

I got the test in hand and saw that it was exactly the SAT. Number sequences, word association, reading comprehension. I figured, “I did it four years ago without even getting a good night’s sleep; surely, I can do it after four years of high quality university education!”

Then the phone started ringing.

From virtually the moment Underling stepped out of the room until the moment I finished the test, a phone directly behind me rang unceasingly in that bleepy office-phone way. Now, I was taking this test for twenty minutes. Nobody, no matter how badly they want to reach someone, lets the phone ring for twenty minutes. Especially when the phone is in a room that no one uses. It was obvious to me after several minutes that I was being, if you don’t mind my saying so, f@#%ed with. That, combined with the fact that I was being subjected to an IQ test in the first place, really poked my beehive.

As a prospective employee, what kind of message was all of this supposed to send? “Welcome to our little corporate family, where your dignity is our toybox.” My God, it was just like being at home.

After the phone stopped ringing and Underling came back, my IQ test was graded. It was actually graded quickly, so quickly in fact that it was obviously the least important part of the process. Then I was told I had to be interviewed again.

The H.R. people are, by definition, in charge of hiring and firing. Nevertheless, their opinions on who is to be hired are apparently not to be trusted, because I now had to go do an interview with the person in charge of the actual department in need. This person, I discovered, was not located in the building; she was in another building at the opposite end of the industrial park. As hour #2 passed, I got in my car and headed over to the next part of the gauntlet.

Another interview ensued, even more forgettable than the first. All I remember is the woman asking me, “Why do you want to work for us?” and me thinking, “I can no longer remember.” I think I responded with something like, “I need food.” Then she sent me back to Underling.

At this point, I couldn’t leave; I had invested too much time in the process. If nothing else, I wanted a chance to tell somebody to screw off. So I went back and dialed Underling.

Nobody answered the phone.

I eventually got back in, only to be told I had to take another test. The test was 135 questions long and was thicker than the application packet. I was instructed to “answer honestly.” As I got over the shock of being handed another test, I realized that it was in essence a decency test. In a ham-handed attempt to be sneaky, its questions were typically phrased as follows:

“You work hard for a company that makes billions of dollars. You deserve a little something extra, even if it is technically ‘stealing.’ True/False”

“I plan to get another job as soon as possible, wasting this company’s valuable time. True/False”

“Experimenting with drugs is normal. Everybody does it. We won’t judge you. With this in mind, how many drugs are you doing currently?___”

“Everybody steals a little something from their job every once in a while. It’s completely normal. So--just between you and me-- how much have you stolen from your last three jobs, in dollars?___”

I was utterly offended, on every possible level. Not only did they think I was a junkie, they thought I was too stupid to see that they thought I was a junkie! Surely they must have realized how much they were insulting people’s intelligence; they had my friggin’ IQ test, after all.

Then, in the midst of my indignation, I thought, “Waaaaaaait a second.... what if these questions only appear obvious and ham-handed? What if I’m being psychologically probed in a way that isn’t obvious? What if, by answering ‘never’ to all of the ‘how often do you lie’ questions, I appear overzealous? Is it designed to see if I have something to hide? Well, we’ll see about that....”

I began to check “seldom” instead of “never.” I gave my dark side the benefit of the doubt. Little did I know that it would spell my doom.

When I got to a question that asked, “How much have you stolen from places other than work in the last three years?”, I thought, “I can’t remember ever stealing from anyone!” I checked the box that said, “can’t remember.”

The correct “honest” answer, for those of you keeping score at home, is “ZERO DOLLARS.”

I turned in my second test and waited for Underling to assign me a term paper. Underling disappeared with my test and did not return for fifty minutes. For nearly an hour, I sat in that office in my itchy interview clothes staring at a Monet poster. I was sure I had been forgotten and was about to scream when Underling summoned me.

Underling was smiling, and in fact never stopped grinning the entire time.

“I’ve gone over everything, and you’re a smart guy. You have high scores and good qualifications. But, well, basically you failed this test. I mean, come on; ‘can’t remember’ is no kinda answer.” The grin never faded; it was as if I was being serenaded by a lounge singer.

Oh, GOD! I thought. I can't have been here for three hours to have thrown it away on this!!!

“I’ll tell you what, though... I’m going to go against my better judgment and make you a job offer anyway.”

“But,” grinned Underling, “I’ll be watchin’ ya.”

Then the little troll winked at me. Winked. I almost started swinging.

Instead, I took the job offer like a hungry dog. Full time, full benefits. I was to begin bright and early Monday morning.

“Oh,” I said, “I need to undergo some minor outpatient surgery. I have to go to the doctor on Monday afternoon. Is there any way I could start on Tuesday, or perhaps leave early on Monday...?”

“No,” grinned Underling. “Monday morning. 8:30.” Grin grin grin. No surgery for you, smiled the happy dictator.

Underling then told me I had to take a drug test. I got a list of clinics in the area where I could go to get it done, just in case some cocaine had slipped through the cracks of the decency exam. As I picked up the forms, Underling added, “Today.”

I blinked in disbelief at the arbitrary way in which this troll was making me dance. “I have a prior appointment this afternoon,” I said. “Is there any possible way that I could...”

“No.” Grin grin. “Today.”

With that warm welcome, I left my new workplace and went to take my @#%$ drug test.

Even though the drug test was actually the simplest and quickest part of the entire day (during which I learned that I can pee in exact metric measurements if asked), my interview clocked in at just about four hours. It was one of the most emotionally draining exercises I have undertaken since I took “Philosophy of Karl Marx” my junior year of college. I was overjoyed when I was finally able to loosen my tie and head over to SLU to collect my girlfriend and comrades for the movie.

SLU is an entirely different world after graduation, primarily because you lose your parking pass. You become like an airline pilot; although you have an estimated arrival time, you usually have to spend twenty minutes or so circling until a runway is clear. I actually found an open parking meter less than ten blocks from my girlfriend’s room after only ten minutes this time.

To get inside the dorm, I had to walk up to a lonely little phone on a lonely little wall in a 10’ x 10’ waiting area and dial my girlfriend.

She wasn’t there.

I waited and tried again. I left a message and hiked two blocks in my suit to my friend Greg’s apartment, since he was also going with us. I called up to his room from his apartment’s 10’ x 10’ waiting area.

He wasn’t there.

I was on my way to buy a gun when I ran into my girlfriend. She had chosen the exactly wrong moment to return some library books. Greg and Brian had gone without us. They thought I’d forgotten. Since I’d gone to all the trouble of getting mad at her in the first place, I tried valiantly to stay mad for a few moments more. It didn’t work, though, so I loosened up a bit and told her my tale. I was too wrung out to stay mad. Unlike Underling, she hadn’t screwed with me on purpose, so we put the whole day behind us and played some Nintendo.

Employed. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone....