A Better Job Interview

Job interviews are difficult. Three people with a list of 20 basically irrelevant questions take turns asking them. They methodically write down your answers.

They already know you are qualified to do the job. They decided this from your resume. That’s why you got the interview. This is the swimsuit part of the job pageant. They want to look at you. They want to decide how you’re going to fit into their office based on your appearance, voice, behavior.

The questions reward people who are good at lying on their feet quickly and convincingly. Every answer may be utter baloney, and the interviewers don’t know that.

This gets you a new employee who will be able to call in sick, even when they’re not, and make you believe it. Or provide a creditable explanation why a project isn’t progressing, even when it’s not remotely true.

Then they usually end the interview by asking if there’s anything you’d like to know about the job? I know asking about benefits or hours shows you’re only interested in helping yourself, and not the company, so that’s the wrong thing to say. I don’t know what the right thing to ask them is.

I do know you can’t ask any of the things you really want to know, like how crazy are my co-workers and bosses? Most of the jobs I’ve had, I wouldn’t have applied for them if I didn’t think it was something I’d enjoy or could do. But when I’ve quit, it’s always been because the people were insane.

How many women in your office are childless and what positions of power are they in? If you have kids, a childless woman is not going to comprehend how you have to juggle your priorities. And if you are not raising kids and you are surrounded by women who spend 80 percent of their work time raising their kids by telephone, it is going to drive you crazy.

Who smokes and are they management or peons? If management smokes, the peons who also smoke are going to be sharing quality, relaxation time with the bosses out on the sidewalk half a dozen times a day. They will bond on a level the non-smokers cannot hope to obtain. This is such a truth, it’s been an episode of “Friends.” And if your boss doesn’t smoke, he or she, and your nonsmoking co-workers are going to perceive the smoke breaks you need as wasted time.

How many people in the office wear excessive amounts of cologne, and how close will they sit to you? One cubicle dweller I worked with even took issue with the smell of gum or mints. I have despised jobs where co-workers frequently went out for Chinese, but didn’t stay out with it. They brought it back to their desks where the stench hung in the air for the rest of the afternoon. Microwave popcorn poppers can make a whole floor smell like a movie theater.

Who is a cleaning fanatic, and how much power do they have? The cleaning fanatics tend to be the same group that likes to celebrate birthdays, promotions, and departures with baked goods. Any excuse for yet another office cake is seized, but then they chase you down the hall with a vacuum cleaner because you dropped a crumb.

Are you being hired to do the job as outlined, or are there Secret Hidden Responsibilities, like watering the plants? I once had a boss who hired me for my computer skills but yelled at me every day because the office plants weren’t thriving.

How crazy are the coffee people? The Office Coffee Militia have notes pinned around the coffee area with warnings to pay for every cup, clean up after yourself, don’t leave cups in the sink, turn the pot off when the coffee is low, whoever takes the last cup has to make the next pot, and so on. Half their day at work is spent making coffee, complaining about the coffee area, policing other people’s coffee habits, or obsessing about the coffee situation.

Are the bosses big picture people or little pickers? In the big picture view, the job is getting done. It’s getting done well. It’s getting done on schedule. But that’s not enough for little pickers. They may want you to come in exactly on time. Not five minutes late, but exactly, and this may become an obsession. They may put a stopwatch on lunch or breaks.

Or they may require dozens of little progress reports, explanations of how your time was spent, budgets of how you expect to spend your time next week, time off requests in triplicate and signed by three levels of managers. The evidence that the work is actually getting done is not good enough. Staff meetings are spent discussing disappearing pencils or toilet paper supply. It’s like the Caine Mutiny Court Martial where the captain becomes obsessed with whether or not someone is stealing the strawberries from the food locker, right in the middle of World War II.

These are some of the questions I’d like to ask at job interviews. I want to know the personal quirks and habits of everyone who is going to sit near me, or make decisions about how I get the job done. I’m spending 40 to 50 hours a week with these people. I’ll see them more than my family. But if you actually asked questions like that, they’d think you were insane. You’d never get hired. And yet, it’s the basis of  whether or not you’re going to be successful and effective in that position.

Speak English

Does it bug you that every time you want to get $20, you have to tell the ATM machine you don’t speak Spanish? Or every time you call your bank or credit card for a statement, you have to select “1” for English or “2” for Spanish? Or that all the signs in Home Depot and Lowe’s are now in English and Spanish?

I thought the United States was a cultural melting pot. You get in the pot and melt into a fairly homogenized stew, and somewhere along the line it was decided the stew would speak English. But now you don’t have to.

One way to jumpstart everyone into learning English as quickly as possible is not to have all this coddling with options! At least, that’s what my grandmother would say. Nothing infuriated her more than the proliferation of Spanish. She was living in Kissimmee, Florida, and Southern Florida might as well be a part of South America, so much Spanish is heard. I’ve been to supermarkets there where every magazine at the check-out was in Spanish, driven through shopping districts where all the signs were in Spanish. You could get along very well without ever learning English.

Things weren’t so accommodating when my grandmother came to this country from Italy in 1916 at age 12. Because she didn’t speak English, she was put in a first grade class, despite being a preteen, and expected to figure things out from there.

 “Padrones”—self-appointed negotiators and problem-solvers for Italian immigrants—would visit the neighborhoods and conduct their English business for them for a fee. My grandmother’s family hired one to register the births, and he’d take his commission and make a stop at the corner bar first. By the time he got to city hall, he had forgotten the name of the baby he was supposed to register, so he’d make up a name, much to the surprise of my relatives when they had to get their birth certificates years later for military service or marriage.

My grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage at 14, got divorced when she was 22 and had four children. She supported herself for the rest of her life as a hairdresser. That required she learn English to talk to her customers, and by necessity, she did.

My grandfather did not. He came to America as a teenager and died in his eighties, and all that time he lived in Flushing, New York, he learned very little English. How could that be? How could you live in New York for 70 years, listening to the radio, watching television, and not learn English?

How? Because he lived in an Italian neighborhood, all the tenants in his apartment building were Italian, his first and second wives were Italian, every one he worked with at the wire factory was Italian. All his friends were Italian. He completely insulated himself from life in an English-speaking country. He never learned to read or write Italian or English.

I can’t tell you a thing about him, even though I lived with him for a year when my son was a baby and had breakfast, lunch and dinner with him every day. Our conversation in all that time consisted of a daily commentary on my non-supporting husband back in Virginia—“eessa bum,” and a daily weather report, “eessa louse day.”

My grandmother remarried him platonically 45 years after she divorced him just to torture him to death, and yelled at him in Italian all day. Sometimes he would mumble something back.

 “What he’d say, Nana?”

 “He says he’s going to chop up my car with an ax.”

It would have been nice to find out why—or maybe when—but he wasn’t talking, not in English anyway.

One day I visited Ellis Island—by way of the internet—to find out something about him. I had to guess at what his name was since I knew him only as Sam. I tried Saverio Matera, and there he was. He left St. Marco via the port of Naples on a ship named the Ancona and arrived at Ellis Island, April 6, 1914. He was 16 years old.

Eighty-six years of family history, 70 of it spent in America, and he couldn’t tell me anything and I can’t tell anyone anything about him now. Somewhere along the line he should have learned some more English. The ATM machines in Flushing now probably ask if you want your transaction in English, Spanish or Italian? Maybe even Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Klingon. I noticed the other day my ATM was now offering Russian. There is no large Russian community where I live. Why is this? Where does this end?

No need to melt in the melting pot now. We’ll keep you handicapped in America by accommodating your language requirements for some things, thus limiting your opportunities and keeping you segregated from the rest of us and even your own American-born family members.

Art - Real or Imagined?

I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir of her time with Robert Maplethorpe, from their amazing meeting – really, in a city as big as New York, how do you accidentally run into the same person three times in a short period in completely different places? – to right before they both became famous and went their separate ways. Just Kids was an astounding book. Some people just know exactly when and where to stand for lightning to strike.

Through the book, I again encountered the poet Arthur Rimbaud, Smith's hero, and someone who had also hovered over the life of Jim Morrison, another person I once studied for his uncanny ability to attract fame and fortune through poetry while in the middle of self-destructing.

I was a student of Morrison in the pre-Internet era, so this time when Rimbaud reappeared as the mystic inspiration and king of all poets, I researched him, only to find a callow, decadent youth who wrote the bulk of his poetry in his late teens and was burnt out by 21, dragging out his last years in the usual mayhem, decadence, poverty, and illness.

What do teenagers know? Smith and Maplethorpe were barely out of their teens when they spent hours together drawing sketches, making necklaces out of tackle shop beads and feathers, and taking Polaroids. And all this activity is somehow high art, important art, creating a world that is on a higher artistic plain.

When does the humble Polaroid become art? The difference between their photographs and the thousands on Facebook seems to be lighting and background. Plain, uncluttered, stark backgrounds, good natural lighting, an unsmiling person with a prop or two, that’s art. (It also helps to not have a television to drug you, so you actually do spend every evening cutting pictures out of magazines and making collages.)

So I examine my soul because I am unable to appreciate Rimbaud’s poetry. It seems so Anyone Can Do This. So much poetry is the recitation of things happening in nature that you then internalize to an emotion. My despair floats along the breeze like the withered maple leaves of fall. You are hopelessly in love. You are filled with desire to live life only on your terms, even if it means starving and dragging down everyone with you. You let go. You seize the day. You see the light. You plunge into darkness. You quoth the raven, nevermore. You contemplate a fork in the road and take the one less traveled by. Housework drives you crazy, white Godiva, I unpeel dead hands, dead stringencies, and then stick my head in an oven.

Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted, he wrote on her headstone.

Really, poet laureate of Britain, that’s all you’ve got? What does it mean? Anything you want, I guess. It’s the fun of poetry, to decipher it through a lens of your own experience and take it anywhere you want it to go.

Like Jackson Pollack’s art, it seems to be an acquired taste. Why are the same ramblings, or the same splatterings, art in some people’s hands and not in others? It must have something to do with believing you are an artist. If you believe hard enough, hard enough to starve and disrupt and annoy, you’ll convince enough people that you are an artist. My Polaroid picture is art. Yours is a Polaroid picture.

Maybe I have just never believed deeply enough in my own Polaroid pictures. How often are artists discovered that have no idea they are creating art, other than Smithfield the pig? Smithfield the pig meet Jackson Pollack. No, you discover yourself and just convince everyone else.

So, in the spirit of believing, I went back in time to discover myself and pulled out a book of my poetry, written between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was in my tender Arthur Rimbaud years, so ignorant of life that I was still comparing my new emotions to nature, the starry nights, the gentle breezes, the babbling brooks, the silence of a forest, butterflies in a meadow. How amazing to be 15, to have only been on this planet such a short time, in a body still growing, being controlled by a brain with so little information. Everything really was new. If a born blind person suddenly sees, how do they put anything in context?

I try to see art in it, but there’s been too many years, too many experiences, too much pain since then to appreciate how first love felt, why some callow young boy would be so damn important or inspiring, or why losing my virginity left me so thunderstruck and conflicted, when girls today toss it out the window like fast-food wrappers. All I can think now is I must have been crazy insane to feel this way about things that ultimately became irrelevant. Well, if I had drank or drugged myself to death a short time later, or stuck my head in an oven, and left behind these crazy poems, I guess they would be pretty damn relevant.

Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, the musical poets of my youth -- if they had lived, would they still find truth or beauty in their songs? Or would they be as embarrassing to them as my poems are to me?

In a book of astounding sentences in Just Kids, one of the more astounding ones to me was when Patti leaves her bookstore job to apartment-sit for a musician/lover who is touring with Blue Oyster Cult. When she gets to that part of her story, she remembers that it was the last time she ever had to “work” for a living at a day job for the rest of her life. She was barely 21, if that. It was all music, poetry, art, and writing from then on, because she believed she was doing great work at all of that, and so did others. She never punched a time clock again. Not that life was easy all the time after that, but it was art. And for her, it still is.

What It Takes to Get a Job

The last time I was on unemployment benefits was 2001. I was laid off in August and didn't go back to work full time until March 2002. I had to put in job cards every week to show I was actively looking for work during that time in order to collect my unemployment check.

Tonight I found the notebook where I kept my job search records. It is an interesting saga of what it takes to actually find a job. Here's where I applied.

1. Pamunkey Library
2. Style Weekly
3. WHAN Radio
4. Virginia Department of Emergency Management. I had worked part-time here from 1997 to 1999, and a couple of months after 9/11, my old part-time job opened again, so I went back for awhile. Even so, the salary and hours were low enough that I could keep applying for and receiving reduced unemployment benefits.
5. Hanover County Sheriff's Office
5. Randolph-Macon College (I was willing to be a receptionist, but no.)
6. Cavalier Telephone
7. Some mysterious "marketing specialist" ad in the paper
8. Department of Conservation and Recreation
9. Henrico County Schools
10. Hanover Department of Social Services
11. Henrico County Leader
11. Christian Children's Fund
12. VCU - the position advertised was director of Alumni Relations. I was an alumni.
I could direct. But no.
13. Richmond Times-Dispatch - The job was taking in the wedding and engagement submissions. I had a degree in journalism. Didn't even get an interview.
14. Hanover County -- anything they had
15. Hanover School Board - anything?
16. VCU Health Systems -- position was public relations practitioner IV
17. Kwick Kopy -- Yes, I will make copies and I will make them quick, but didn't even get an interview.
18. Time-Life Customer Service - I have applied here at least four times in my life and gotten interviews, and even though I have done customer service by telephone for a bank and a mail-order pharmacy, they still refused to believe I could service orders for the complete World War II series.
19. Channel 12 - the position was assistant to the vice president
20. University of Richmond - anything
21. PharMerica
22. St. Joseph's Villa
23. Diamond Springs Water
24. Richmond Coliseum
25. James River Associates
26. Bon Secours Memorial Regional Medical Center -- admin associate in the Surgical Care Center, unit secretary at Meadowbridge Transit Care. I even applied to work in the gift shop, but no
27. Copier Care Company
28. Northside Magazine
29. Richmond Voice - I can do newspaper page layout better than anyone they have ever had in the past 15 years. I know how to size a photo without stretching it into distortion! But no interview.
30. City of Richmond, Office of the City Manager
34. Virginia Department of Fire Programs. I got an interview here, but no. Years later I would work with the guy who got the job.
35. Virginia Department of Health
36. Supply Room Companies
37. VCU Department of Student Affairs
38. March of Dimes - I got an interview here and if I am not mistaken, the person vacating the job had been hired as the new editor of Style Weekly. They had loved him, and his shoes were going to be hard to fill. And not by me. It was a no.
39. Virginia Community Policing Institute
40. Bankruptcy Court
41. Hanover Herald Progress
42. Capital Mac
43. Richmond Metro Visitors Center
44. Virginia Blood Services
45. New Kent County Planning Commission - I remember driving out there and thinking this would be a very long daily commute. I guess the no was a blessing.
46. Tobacco Company -  Got an interview. They had a position that marketed their nightclub events. "Sex and the City" theme nights were big then. Are you a Carrie or a Miranda! But no.
47. County of Henrico
48. Inside Business
49. University News at VCU
50. Girl Scouts of America
51. Salvation Army
52. Valentine Museum
53. Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Administration
54. Glen Allen Cultural Arts Center

One of these places, I applied for the job in November and didn't get an interview. But in January, I got a call out of the blue about another job in the same office. They had kept my application on file. I know they always say that, but you don't really believe it. That was a part-time job, so I worked downtown in the morning and rushed over to VDEM way down Midlothian Turnpike in the afternoon, grabbing a $2.25 hot dog and soda along the way. I paid $10 a day to park in the Coliseum deck just in the mornings, which was crazy, but the only way I could make it work.

In March, I had to interview for my own job when it was upgraded to full-time. I recognized some of the other people who were interviewing from other job interviews or from working with them in previous jobs. I pretty much knew I had a 99 percent lock on getting the job because I was already doing it at the place. I was sitting in the chair. But the other five candidates didn't know that. I felt sorry for them, as I saw them come through, so hopeful. It dawned on me that many, many times, I was just one of the people Human Resources was interviewing as a fake-out, to look like they were actually trying, when all along, everyone already knew who was getting the job.

The journalism/public relations field for a long time was the same crowd of people who just kept rotating around. Several of the people who got the jobs I didn't get during that time ended up working where I am now. We all go 'round and 'round.

About four years later, the job I had originally applied for in November opened again, and I interviewed for that and got it. Again, I was already in the office. I was actually doing that job and my own and had been for months. And yet they interviewed five other people along with me.

So that was a very long trip to my current position.

Since then, there's been hiring freezes and no money in the budget for raises and I've been stuck in 2006 career-wise, except for completely recreating my job to be social media managing since the rest of it went extinct like dinosaurs hit by meteorites. Public relations and marketing in the 2000s was what journalism was in the Woodward and Bernstein years of the 1970s. Everyone and their grandmother playing Farmville on Facebook is now a social media expert.

Probably Less Human then Human

Sometime in the mid-90s, I became entranced -- for the first and last time -- by White Zombie, more specifically, one particular White Zombie song, "More Human Than Human."

And somehow -- my boyfriend -- who we shall call B -- acquired free tickets to a White Zombie concert at the Nissan Pavilion in Manassas, which required we ride on a local radio station bus to the event with other ticket winners.

My boyfriend had a friend who listened to his radio all day long and had become the master of speed dialing. He was almost always able to win concert tickets by being caller No. 9 or No. 7 or whatever the number you needed to be. And that's how we acquired the tickets. He actually won twice for this concert, and since you can't win twice, he gave B's name for the second set.

B and I boarded the radio station bus at the Arboretum. C and his wife, J, were leaving later and driving themselves.

Much to my surprise, as soon as the bus pulled away from the Arboretum, all the bongs came out. I thought pot was illegal. The bus proceeded to Manassas in an internal fog, and we were late getting into the Nissan because the bus driver got so lost, we ended up in Washington for awhile. Must have been the fumes.

The amphitheater was packed; the bands were loud, and by the time White Zombie came on, I was exhausted from the crowd, the fights breaking out, the noise, the vomiting, everything. And we hadn't even been there very long. I vaguely recall White Zombie had a scary and profane stage set that upset my Baptist/Catholic sensibilities. I am thinking it must have been Christ on the Cross imagery that was blasphemously displayed. I have blacked that memory out. In any case, as soon as they finished "More Human Than Human," I was ready to go. It started raining as we retreated to the bus.

Back in the bus, it was almost as bad as the amphitheater. Refugees who were already too drunk, too sick, and too beaten up had already returned to the bus to continue being drunk, sick and angry. Some of them hadn't even made it to White Zombie. Just as we settled in our seats in this Hell Bus of vomit, I spotted C and J walking through the parking lot. We scrambled off the bus. There was much rejoicing, as we had not known they had won more tickets and were going to be there. They offered us a ride back to Richmond. By now, it was raining hard.

So off we went down the highway, and just like in the bus, the bongs came out and I found myself once again encased in fog and everyone except me was pretty mellow. I was particularly unmellow because it was dark and raining furiously. Visibility was zero. J was driving. I was terrified.

As the rain came down harder, C would give J words of encouragement about what a great driving job she was doing, and reward her with a nip off a flask he pulled out from under his jacket. So now I was hurtling through the rainy night in a carload of people who were stoned and drinking. And I was pretty sure when we collided with whatever we were bound to collide with and die, I'd be the only one who would feel it. It sucks being the sober one.

But that night, we did not. We were delivered back to the Arboretum where I retrieved my car and went home and lived to tell this tale.

I don't think about it much anymore, but it was one of the few adventures of my life since I tend not to walk on the wild side. I pace through life with training wheels and a helmet -- not that this trip to see White Zombie was even all that wild.

But tonight, someone on my Facebook feed posted a Morphine video, which made me go to iTunes to look up Morphine, since it seemed there was a long-forgotten song of theirs I really liked at one time, and iTunes suggested I might like Les Claypool, too, which I sort of do, so I clicked on "Winona's Big Brown Beaver" just to hear it again. Then iTunes suggested I might like White Zombie, and all this memory, so long buried, rushed back.

Giving Up Stuff

Every year, my resolution is to quit more things.

I gave up being a blonde. I started being a blonde as a result of a well water accident in 2001. We had poured bleach down our well to clean it and must have used too much bleach. After I took a shower,   the water stripped all the color out of my hair. I was between jobs at the time, so trying a radically different look as an experiment was not disruptive. I didn't have to endure a day of shocked looks or comments. I just became blonde after that. But this year I decided it was making me look tired, so I gradually went back to my brown hair.

I gave up the newspaper. First I cut back to just Sunday. Then I got rid of Sunday, too, because it was like homework to feel like I was getting my money's worth. Then I even stopped looking at the paper at work. I am inundated with what's happening in the world through the Internet and social media.

Without the Sunday paper, I had fewer coupons. Then no coupons. So I stopped cutting out coupons. Sure, I pay full price for toilet paper now, but I also don't buy new products I don't really need just because I have a coupon.

I am pretty close to giving up Christmas. I finally told my family that I was not buying any of them gifts. They have everything they need. I don't enjoy shopping, especially when everyone has to have a gift at the same time, during a season when the stores are crowded, the weather is cold, and it gets dark so early. Why isn't Christmas in April when Jesus was actually born? Also, we did absolutely no decorating this year. None. Not even the little window tree came out. Which is great because this weekend I don't have to pack up any decorations.

There might be other things I gave up for good this year, but these are the big ones. I am at that age now where I can say with all sincerity that,"I am too old for this crap," and not put up with annoying people, insane coworkers, pointless family traditions, and a host of other things that people do just to be polite. Unlike those gay cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain," I do know how to quit you.

The Christmas Ficus

I am not a plant person. To me, tending plants is like working in a nursing home. Your charges take a great deal of care and special attention, but will never get to the point where they can get along without you. And then they die.

One year for my birthday, a well-meaning relative gave me three very large house plants. I put the plants out on the sun porch where they took up all the space, and we had our first emergency immediately. One of my cats chewed up some of the leaves. She spent the evening throwing up. We went to the internet, researched plants that made cats sick, and sure enough, we had a cat-killing plant. It went outside. It was followed by the other two the next day.
 

I assumed they would whither and die over the summer, and that would be the end of it, but God watered them and they flourished.

Since my husband’s family had given us the plants, he took responsibility for keeping them alive, despite my ambivalence. He repotted the ficus and it grew twice as high over the summer. He bought more pots and potting soil for the other two, but lost interest in the project. So now I had thriving plants in the yard, and a sun porch cluttered with unused pots and potting soil.

I felt resentment toward pots and plants.

At the end of the summer, the plant-gifter came over to visit and we lied about how much we were enjoying the plants and how well they were doing outside. But, I confessed, with winter coming, they’d have to move back inside and one was a cat-killing plant. The plant-gifter volunteered to take that one home and return it in the spring. I prayed she would offer the same deal for the others, but she left with just the cat-killer. I prayed she would forget to return it in the spring, and that prayer was answered. I never asked about it.

Then my husband’s grandfather died, and his office sent over a plant to console us. We were back to three large plants again, the ficus, some leafy thing, and the dead grandfather plant.

The weather turned cold and the plants began to look endangered. Time to take them to the dump! Right?

No, my husband brought them all inside. His family had given us two of them, and the other was his comfort plant for losing a grandfather, he said. So they all sat on the dining room table, the only available space near a window, leaving no room for anything else, and still not getting enough sun since the dining room faced north. In the evening, we turned on desk lights to shine on the plants. They all perked up.

Will this ever end?

A cricket rode in on one of the plants, and periodically it chirped, getting the cats all excited. One evening when we were out, the cats went on a Cricket Mission from God and attacked the plants. We came home to dirt all over the dining room. Despite the attack, the plants thrived.

To make some room on the dining room table, we moved the ficus to in front of the fireplace. We did not have a fire in the fireplace that winter because it would ignite the ficus. We did not have a Christmas tree that year because the only place to put one was taken by the ficus. So we hung some tinsel on the ficus and made do.