Say What?

I read this the other day:

“Ethics is the new competitive environment.”
—Peter Robinson, business leader

Oh, Mr. Robinson, how you make me laugh. I know it wasn’t your intention. But, honestly, there are so few of your kind who care about social responsibility and the high road—opting instead for shareholder happiness and the bottom line—that I’d hardly call your arena “competitive.” But we can keep dreaming, can’t we?

[Graphic from the Everything Small Business Journal.]

Gambling for a Job

ay back when, in the 1980s, I met numerous people (most of them actors) who lied in order to clinch a job. They “embellished” their computer expertise (that is, they said they knew how to operate one when they didn’t), and it worked for all of them. They acquired their computer skills successfully while on the jobs, and their organizations benefited from their employment.

This was concurrently appalling and revelatory news to me. It never occurred to me that you could pretend to be the employee the employer wanted in the interview and then become that ideal employee once in the job. It’s not in my nature to pass myself off as someone I’m not.

The job market is much tougher now and those ’80s shenanigans are harder to pull off. I wonder how many job-seekers are willing to lie if it gets them through a door. I wonder how many succeed.

I did something similar once, though I put no one except myself at risk.

I was auditioning for a small-town production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and was slated to read for one of the girl parts. But I didn’t want to be a girl. I wanted to be the DOG. The director was auditioning only men for the role of Snoopy, so I knew I was not only up against worthy talent, but up against a prejudiced vision as well.

I thought long and hard about how much I wanted the role and how competitive I would have to be to win it. Was I up to the task?

I hatched a plan so antithetical to my personality that I still marvel at it: I schemed to throw my audition. I would purposely botch my reading for a girl part and finagle an audition for Snoopy, during which I had to be so sensational that no one could imagine anyone else in the role.

The first part of my plan—botching the audition—was the worst. Being a failure and seeing it reflected in the faces of an audience would be humiliating. It would knock me out of the running for all the human characters in the musical and, if the second part of my plan didn’t work, would knock me out of the show completely. What’s more, my plan was a little lean on detail. I had no idea how to wheedle that second audition. Fortunately, the director ended up relieving me of this concern.

The night of the callbacks (callbacks are the repeat auditions for a select number of actors who make the first cut—much like second and third interviews in a job hunt), after the director had seen all he intended to, he asked if anyone wanted to read for a part they hadn’t yet been asked to read for. My hand shot up.

I performed my song-and-dance routine. I gave it my all and had a great time doing it. By the time I finished, it didn’t matter anymore whether I’d changed the director’s mind or didn’t get cast. What mattered was that I had done everything in my power to attain a goal. I had lived through humiliation and stepped outside my comfort zone. I felt changed … enhanced, somehow … new.

Though searching for employment in today’s economy is soul-breaking work, I would never advise you to compromise your integrity for a paycheck. But stretching boundaries and going for a long-shot dream job? Absolutely. The preparation you’ll undergo to make others believe in you can make you believe in yourself. And that’s worth more than any job.

That’s what I thought, anyway, after auditioning for the musical. I was okay with not getting a part. But when the cast was announced, it seemed the director had reconsidered his gender-biased notion of Snoopy.

I became a long-eared pooch for an entire summer. My high-risk gamble for a job with no pay paid off.

[See more designs by Alejandro Paul.]

The Truth Trap

hile applying for a volunteer position last week, I wrote myself into a corner and a confession.

The position is at a local animal shelter. I didn’t want to be too cliché and say I love all animals—largely because it isn’t true. (Back when I was a hiring manager, countless applicants for editorial positions wrote “I love words” in their cover letters. I believed them, but I also grew weary of the repetition. I assume it’s the same for hiring managers at shelters.)

I told the volunteer coordinator that I had a reverence for most animals, with the exception of clothes moths. I didn’t tell her just how much I loathe the little critters. Even writing about them gives me a serious case of the heebie-jeebies. Makes me want to burn the clothes they light on and take a bath.

I have, in fact, killed clothes moths. We had an infestation of them one year in our apartment and lost countless cashmere sweaters and woolen goods. I’ve held it against them ever since.

Do you think I blew my chances at the position? Can a moth murderer be accepted in the animal welfare community?

[Drop cap by Jessica Hische.]

Test Your Integrity

just finished reading Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr. If you’re an aspiring poet or essayist, a lapsed church-goer or doubting Believer, a recovering alcoholic or recovering from a tragic childhood, you should read this. I don’t fall into any of those categories and I still inhaled the book, just as I did Karr’s earlier memoirs, The Liars’ Club and Cherry.

The other night as I was applying for a job online, this passage from Lit came to mind:

“I need his unbudgeable integrity. I mean, when a big-deal magazine requested changing some of his poems, he pulled them rather than compromise. I’d have typed mine backward in Urdu to see them into print.”

Some folks fudge their work history just to land the position. I’m not one of them. In fact, I probably (stupidly) err on the side of modesty about my skills and experience. So when I got to this question in the application for a university job—
How many years of clerical/administrative experience do you have working in an academic setting?
—my answer was easy: I’ve never worked in an academic setting.

Except, of course, it wasn’t easy. I had to choose from this multiple-choice list of answers:
No Response
More than 0, up through 1 yr
More than 1 yr, up through 3 yrs
More than 3 yrs, up through 5 yrs
More than 5 years

This hardly seemed like a deal-breaker question, but university applications contain all sorts of warnings about being factual and truthful and passing background checks and drug screenings and if I lie about ANYTHING at all the consequences will be yada yada yada. In truth, I HAVE worked in an academic setting if you count the time I spent teaching high-schoolers. But because the job ad stated a “scholarly” background is preferred, I assume the question refers to the college-level community. So which answer would you choose?

I selected “No Response” and continued with the process. But when I was finished, a red warning popped up telling me my application was incomplete. I had “not answered” the very question that had stumped me.

Well, technically, I guess No Response is not an answer. But why in bloody Hell is it listed and formatted as if it were? The problem isn’t my integrity; the problem is a writer’s inability to form sensible questions with appropriate multiple-choice answers.

So I selected the next answer on the list—“More than 0, up through 1 yr”—then addressed the matter (as vaguely as possible so as not to offend anyone) in my cover letter.

What would you have done?

[Drop cap by Jessica Hische.]

The Two Most Important Words in Any Relationship

Last week I got a phone call concerning our eviction case. It was a legal assistant from our lawyer’s office who was checking to see if we’d been paying our rent. I assumed she was calling because I usually send proof to my lawyer that the landlord received my rent check, but I hadn’t yet done it for April. I was still waiting for my certified mail return receipt to arrive. However, I told her, the check cleared on April 1. Then the conversation went something like this:

“Are you sending money orders?” she asked.

“No, the landlord agreed to accept personal checks.”

“So have you paid your rent?”

“Yes, and I’ve sent proof of payment every month but this one. As I said, I’m just waiting for the certified mail receipt.”

“But you’ve paid it?”

“Yes, the check already cleared.”

“Let’s see. You’ve been paying $350?”

$350?! Was she looking at the wrong file? “No, I’m paying—have always paid—$______.” Did I miss something that last day in court? Was I given a deal to pay only $350 a month and didn’t know it?

Once we finally seemed to be on the same page, I brought up a matter I’d been concerned about. I told her that based on how Mr. Slimy had been treating other tenants, it looked doubtful that he’d return our security deposit to us. What did she think about approaching Mr. Slimy to keep our security deposit in lieu of our final month’s rent?

Had I known how incendiary this question was I never would have asked it.

The legal assistant reprimanded me for even considering the idea and proceeded to tell me how much her organization had done for us—how proud everyone there was of their work on our behalf, that they’d never before won so many extra months beyond an eviction notice for tenants to remain in their apartments.

“Yes,” I said, “but you never had anyone with a long-term lease like ours…”

“Oh yes we did!” she cut in. “We’ve worked on lots of long-term leases.”

I thought, Then what took you so bloody long to understand our rental situation? Why did we have to explain ourselves over and over and over again? But I held my tongue.

She continued saying something about the paperwork they sent us in March that we were to sign and return, that they’d have to open our case again and return to court.

I kept asking, “What papers? We didn’t receive any papers in March!” But she steamrolled through my questions, starting in again about how grateful we should be that her organization took our case, how deplorable and disrespectful to her colleagues it would be for us to not pay our last month’s rent.

I kept saying, “I was only wondering about it. I thought I’d ask, but clearly I won’t do it. So we needn’t continue discussing it. But will you please tell me what the papers were that you sent in March?”

But she couldn’t stop going on about how much they’d done for us. To cut through her manic drone, at one point I yelled her name, intending to say, “I’M the one who forged the deal! I’M the one who negotiated directly with Mr. Slimy!” But I bit my tongue. I just said, “Look. I’m not lying. I told you we’d pay the last month’s rent and we will. I’m sorry about the papers in March, but we didn’t receive them. I will sign whatever it is you need me to sign, I will continue paying our rent and sending proof to your office that I did, and I will anticipate losing my security deposit to the landlord because once we move out, we want NOTHING more to do with him.”

THEN she started telling me that we could use one of their lawyers who works on nothing but security deposits to get ours back.

I thanked her for the information (which I already knew about), and said it wouldn’t be necessary. But she couldn’t drop the subject. She told me how different everything would be by the time we moved out, how I couldn’t know what the future would bring or how I would react to it.

She was right, but I’d had enough of her. Oh. I forgot to mention that in the middle of her tirade about all they’d done for us she began reading aloud from the court orders. This AFTER she’d said she would mail that paperwork to us.

I couldn’t absorb any more. And I could no longer be civil—I needed to get off the phone before saying something I’d regret. So I reiterated my assurance that we’d pay the last month’s rent and would look for the papers in the mail.

I hung up and screamed an ugly name at her.

This, of course, woke my husband. I recounted my phone conversation for him, trying to get some perspective on it. Though the legal assistant represented a pro bono law firm, I got the distinct impression that her condescension toward me was a power play—that the byproduct of pro bono work for her was ratcheting up her superiority.

Then the phone rang. It was HER!! NOW what?

A miraculous thing: She apologized. She admitted that the papers were sent in January, not March. She explained that the case hadn’t been closed and reopened nor would it need to be reopened. It was all a mistake.

I accepted her apology.

And then she continued talking!!

She was all sweetness and psychological counsel about how it might not seem like it now, but a move is exciting, yada yada yada.

I let her talk—tried not to throw up. And finally I got her off the phone. I was exhausted.

But here’s the important part of the story (you were wondering if I’d ever get to it, weren’t you?): I couldn’t be mad at her any longer because she apologized. There’s a cleansing effect to apologies—especially those made sooner rather than later.

I believe it took courage for her to make that second call to me. (Or, as my father surmised, it took the command from someone who outranked her.) I don’t know if I would have been able to do the same. But she will remain in my mind as a decent example of turning around a tainted relationship, of taking ownership of a mistake and bad behavior, of eating humble pie.

[Pics from top to bottom: Fencing advertisement for the 1900 Summer Olympic Games; the New York City Fencers’ Club as shown in an 1888 issue of Leslie’s Weekly; and José de Ribera’s The Duel of Women.]