Dear Ms. Shires,
The Asheville Police Department hopes that you have recovered from your unfortunate experience as a victim of crime.
Of all the form letters I’ve ever received, this has got to be the weirdest. I feel for the person who first composed it–it is well-written and concise, so I have to assume they were an intelligent sort, and, as such, the larger implications of the work didn’t escape their consideration. What a tricky thing, to communicate empathy in a medium that is by its very nature impersonal. Not a job I’d care to do.
Many of you already know the story: somehow (we will likely never know how), some person (we will likely never know who) obtained my Visa check card number and went on a bit of a shopping spree at a major online electronics retailer. They didn’t show restraint, and it will be a long process to fully recover our losses, despite the professed hopes of that form letter.
Money’s a strange thing. It’s insubstantial–your entire monetary wealth can be nothing more than numbers on a computer screen, accessed via another string of numbers embossed in plastic–but it’s also utterly vital to the way we live our lives. Everything depends on this abstraction that has no inherent or inviolable value of its own. We participate in a fantasy every time we pay the light bill, but this fantasy can easily render us homeless, hungry, destitute if we land on its bad side.
I’ve experienced property crime before. I know the violation of having my house broken into, my private space rifled through like the bargain bins at the outlet mall. It’s not pleasant, and it makes it difficult to feel anything but contempt for one’s fellow human beings.
It’s easy to mouth New Age-y, vaguely Buddhist platitudes, to try on nonattachment like a dress you leave the tags on. It’s easy to say it’s only money–until you lose yours.
When you grow up poor, money can feel like Ariadne’s thread: a slender filament, so easily lost or snapped, that is the only thing preventing you from perishing in darkness. In our currency-based society, anything that threatens your money is a direct threat to your personal security, in the most primal sense: imagine trying to feed, clothe, and house yourself (or your family) without it. This touches the red button of fear deep inside each one of us, in a way that poor folks understand better than anyone else.
I’m not so poor anymore, and we were already on track to get off the currency-based hamster wheel, but that red button never leaves you, once you’ve experienced life with it chronically exposed. And this is what bothers me most about what has happened: we will recover, in time. Not without stress, and not without losing just a little more faith in the human race–but we will recover. But there are many, many people in the world who wouldn’t. A theft like this could render a family homeless. And this person–this thief–was willing to trade that for stuff. Electronics. A big teevee or a computer or a gaming system (actually, likely all three, given the dollar amount involved).
The charges to my bank account weren’t made to the Children’s Cancer Hospital or a grocery store, after all. This erstwhile human being found it okay to trade someone else’s security for toys.
It’s hard not to rage. It’s hard not to flirt with hate when faced with such disregard. It’s hard not to long for something more swift and definitive than karmic justice. It’s hard to figure out precisely what one is supposed to do, stuck in the middle of an abstraction gone wrong.
The rage and the hate and the stress we’ll work on in our own ways. Those things won’t touch our friend with the new teevee, but they will surely corrode us from the inside out, and so there is no good reason to hang on to them. The rest of it–our plans to hike and to stop working for other people and to devote more time and energy to things that really matter–it all remains on track. Because what else can you do? You pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you know the rest.
For Hire
My apologies, folks, for being absent from these pages. I just finished up an intense Critical Care course, which ran six days a week and packed my brain so full of new information that it threatened to go offline. I think if I’d tried to sit down and write, all that would have flown out would be lab values and hemodynamics equations. Consider it my little gift to you that I didn’t.
But the course finished up yesterday, I have a few more letters behind my name, and now I’m in job-search mode. Actually, my first foray into such was immediately after my Critical Care exam last night, and it involved many hoops–a written assessment, skills stations, oral boards, and, of course, the traditional job interview.
I hate the traditional job interview.
I hate it because I don’t think I’m particularly good at it. I’m not particularly good at it because I think it’s a waste of time. I don’t want to answer inane questions thought up by some HR manager who knows essentially nothing about what’s involved in actually doing my job. Sure, I know the theories behind the questions–I’ve been on the asking end of them more than once–but I still maintain that they reveal only the grossest, most general information about a job candidate, without telling the interviewer much (if anything) about the candidate’s suitability for the position. The traditional job interview will illuminate a candidate’s inability to construct a simple sentence or sit still for thirty minutes without chewing on her hair or scratching his balls, but that’s about it. Do you really want to hire someone simply because they don’t scratch their balls in polite company? Is that where the bar is set for you, HR Manager person?
The Man Friend pointed out during my post-interview
rantwhinginganalysis that it comes down to something pretty simple: the hiring process, as most corporations undertake it, is a game, and I’m not a game player. Jumping through hoops is not on my list of “likes”.Guilty as charged.
The standard job interview questions don’t elicit from me what I want to tell the person on the other side of the conference table; they elicit what I think they want to hear. It’s not lying, because the content of my answers is still truthful, but it does still feel somehow dishonest. Forced, really. Manufactured. Played. Spun. If I’d wanted that for a career, I’d have gotten into teevee news. Making me feel just a little dirty is not the way to make me want to work for you.
Maybe it’s just my own myopia, but more and more I feel like my experience of the world is shaped by such game-playing. Politics–an interest I want so much to cultivate, being as it is steeped in history and responsible for shaping so much of how we live our lives–is today little more than spectacle, a revolving cast of players gaming themselves, each other, and the system. As Thomas Friedman put it in his piece in today’s Times, “…our politics has become just another form of sports entertainment, our Congress a forum for legalized bribery and our main lawmaking institutions divided by toxic partisanship to the point of paralysis.” Chris Hedges points out that, “Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas.” It’s farcical and disingenuous and frustrating, and it would all be easy to dismiss but for the fact that what these shysters decide really does impact my life, and yours. Which just makes it worse.
I want as much honesty in my life as will fit. I want to be asked and to answer, to ask and to be answered, without artifice. I want to be swayed by the validity of your argument, the strength of your logic, the deep and moving truth of your emotion, not tricked with smoke and mirrors or dazzled with temptations.
Likewise, I want to rely on my own wits, my own logic, my own skill to change your mind. Ask me to tell you about what I believe, how I do my job, what the work means to me. Don’t ask me to enumerate my weaknesses or tell you where I want to be in five years. If you select me for a job based on how well I can play this game–in other words, how well I can be quasi-dishonest, suppressing my instincts and squashing what I really want to say to give you what I think you want to hear–we both lose.
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Posted in Commentary + Philosophy, Dispatches From the Front
Tagged farce, job interviews, playing games, politics, rant