At the door to my conference room, Pamela stepped aside so I could enter and, when I had, simply told me to “wait here,” and then closed the door with me on the inside and her on the other.
I let out a deep breath. I had admittedly not interviewed for a job in more than a decade, but this so far had been about the strangest interview I had ever been through. It barely felt like an interview at all. Looking at my watch I saw that I had been there for just over two hours, and I estimated that I had only spent about ten minutes answering the kind of questions that could have reasonably been considered part of an actual interview. Everything and everyone else had felt more like an obstacle course -- one that no one had shown me in advance and in which I had no idea what time I was trying to beat as I raced through it.
Not knowing how long I was going to be there and not having anything else to do, I decided to go over and closely examine the framed black and white photo I had only glimpsed before. I was not surprised to see that it was similar to all of those that Thompson had shown me in his office, but it was somewhat larger than any of those. And it was old. Maybe the oldest of all the ones I had seen. It was a wide shot of a hotel ballroom, taken from a balcony, with forty or more figures seated around a series of banquet tables, each and every one of them looking up at the photographer. They were all men, and they were all dressed in formal wear, the deep black of their tuxedo jackets contrasting starkly against the lighter shades of the tablecloths and their shirt fronts. A set of white block letters, standing in the bottom corner, and written apparently by a slanting hand with a fine brush, proclaimed quietly:
FIRST ANNUAL MEETING, 1953
EMPIRE BALLROOM
WALDORF-ASTORIA, NEW YORK
I forced my eyes to move slowly from face to face. They were people from another era, but in their facial features and expressions they seemed as normal as any group of similar men that you could assemble today. Some heavy, some thin. Some dark-haired, some light. Some smiling, some deadly serious.
I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket and I brought it out to see my home number on its little screen.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Alan?” Jenny’s voice said in my ear as I continued to study the photo. “Can you talk? Is the interview over?”
“I don’t know,” I said, completing my tour of faces and finding myself surprised to discover that none of them resembled what a fresh-faced young Mister Richard Thompson would have looked like at the time.
“What do you mean, ‘you don’t know’? Is it over or not?”
“I don’t know,” I said again, pulling my eyes away from the past and trying to explain to her what had happened so far that morning.
“So you’re just supposed to wait there?”
“Apparently.”
“Mommy!” I heard Jacob’s shrill voice shout in the background.
“For how long?” Jenny asked.
“They haven’t told me.”
“How do you think it’s going?”
“Mommy!” Jacob wailed again, this time much closer and with extra anguish.
“Jacob, honey, Mommy’s on the phone with Daddy right now.”
I began to answer Jenny’s question, but stopped when Jacob began shouting and crying again, this time not even bothering to form words.
“Jacob, get down!” Jenny shouted, and then the phone must have slipped out of her grasp because I heard it clunk and clatter on our hardwood floor. “Jacob! Goddammit!”
I stood patiently, feeling some unfocused anger growing within me, but taking some deep breaths and telling myself to calm down. In a moment, Jenny was back on the line, but it was only to tell me to hang on, hang on just a minute, and then the phone clunked again as if being set down on a table. There was rustling, then footsteps, and both shouting and crying, all of it quickly fading off into the distance.
I turned back to the Empire Ballroom, and tried to imagine myself sitting there among those tuxedoed titans. One guy, I noticed, had a fat cigar captured between two thick fingers, and I put myself at his table, between him and another guy that looked more like a university professor, his bow-tied shirt collar hanging loosely in front of his scrawny neck. What, I wondered, had they been talking about before and after the photographer clicked this photo? What was happening in the stock market? How much they did or didn’t like the way Ike was running the country? Their summer cottages in upstate New York? Everything that came into my mind seemed like a cliche, something a stranger would graft thoughtlessly upon another stranger. Surely, like me, these forgotten men had had inner lives that were important to them. They must have had thoughts of esoteric value and worth, and they must have had relationships that both expressed and fell short of those ideals.
“Alan?” Jenny’s voice was again in my ear. “Alan, are you still there?”
“Yes, Jenny. I’m still here.”
“Sorry about that. Jacob needed me.”
“Uh huh. Look, I should go. I don’t know when they’re going to come back for me.”
“Okay. But how do you think it’s going?”
“Jenny, I have no idea. This is about the strangest experience I’ve ever been through.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well, call me when you’re done.”
“Sure will.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
After putting the phone back in my pocket I stood there in silence for perhaps two minutes. I even closed my eyes and strained my ears to pick up any sounds that might be happening in the office on the other side of my conference room door. There was nothing -- at least nothing that I could detect.
Eventually, I took a seat in one of the conference room chairs. Clearing my mind, I opened my padfolio and looked down at the extra copies of my resume that I had brought with me. No one had asked for them, so there they still sat, paper-clipped together in a tight little packet, my name boldly printed across the top of each of them. Setting them aside I revealed the legal pad beneath, on which I had written several questions that I had intended to ask.
What’s the biggest challenge facing this organization?
How would you describe the culture of the Board?
What three things must the new CEO accomplish in the first year in order to be successful?
I had put a lot of thought into those questions, and they still seemed like good ones to me, but I hadn’t had the chance to ask any of them yet. I suddenly wondered if I ever would.
I flipped to a fresh page on the legal pad and picked up the pen. I didn’t know what else to do so I started writing down whatever came into my mind.
No circumstances
Could have prepared me for this
Hope I’m doing fine
I was busy counting the syllables, making sure it was actually a haiku, when the conference room door suddenly opened and Pamela came bursting back into the room.
“Not kept waiting too long, I hope,” she said, her tone back to co-conspirator mode, and quickly took a seat opposite me.
I closed the padfolio on my awful poetry. “No, not at all.”
“Well, well,” Pamela said, “it seems you made quite an impression on them. I knew you would, I knew you would.”
I nodded my head and smiled. “Are they done already?”
“Yes, of course, of course. They are completely done and have made an important decision.” She brought a manilla folder she must have walked in with up from her side and placed it on the table between us.
I looked at my watch, noting that it couldn’t have been more than twelve minutes since I left the Executive Committee. “They are? Did they even bother talking to the third candidate?”
“Excuse me?”
“The third candidate. Weren’t they going to interview someone else after me?”
Pamela’s face actually went pale. “Yes, yes, well, let’s not worry about that. The Executive Committee is, ummm, is meeting with that person as we speak, but they have still already made an important decision. You are moving on to the next step of the process.”
“I am?”
“You are, you are. Here,” Pamela said, sliding the folder across the table to me, “inside this folder you will find a short assessment tool. It’s important for you to complete it as quickly and as honestly as you can.”
I opened the folder. Inside was a paper booklet, printed on something close to newsprint and stapled bound on the left margin, and a single sheet of thicker paper, bearing several hundred small pale red circles and obviously designed for use in an optical recognition scanner.
“Do you need to use the restroom, or do you need a glass of water? Once you begin, we must ask that you work straight through until you finish. I will sit here quietly while you work in order to ensure there is no funny business -- but, of course, there won’t be! My apologies, protocol requires me to say that, but it is a mere formality in your case, I am sure. Just let me know when you are ready to start and I will begin the timer. You will have 60 minutes to complete the assessment, no more, no less -- but, again, I’m sure that such a time limit will be unnecessary for someone of your experience. Do you have a pencil?”
While Pamela spoke I had begun flipping through the booklet, and quickly released that I was facing one of those standardized tests -- some kind of personality assessment, the kind that was intended to trick people into revealing the anti-social tendencies that actually lay under their phony attestations of teamwork and growth that otherwise comprised their interview talk. There were several dozen such assessments on the market, some more well known than others. I had never heard of this one before, but the questions were all too familiar both in their structure and their vagueness. My eye picked one out at random.
I suppose some people may consider me to be a bit of an intellectual.
I was supposed to strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree with that statement. Flipping further through the booklet, I saw that there were more than 200 other such statements I would need to respond to.
“Alan?”
“Yes?” I said, looking up at Pamela.
“Do you have a pencil? You will need a number two pencil in order to complete the response sheet.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t have a pencil.”
“I’ll get you one,” Pamela said smiling, patting my hand reassuringly, before rising from her chair. “I’ll be right back.”
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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