"Oh for Pete's sake, he's fleeing the interview! He's fleeing the interview!" - Marge Gunderson, Fargo

 

Texas sky from the back of the USS Texas. The Mrs. took this picture. Dang, she’s talented.

The only employment related situation that is more stressful than working at a high pressure job is a job interview. It’s even more stressful when your prospective employers kidnap take you out for a training session.

Alia S. Wilder got herself into this today. Me? I was blissfully at work (late) playing Minesweeper® and drinking a chocolate YooHoo™ while sitting in a bean bag. No, just kidding, I’m not a doctor. I was slaving over a spreadsheet.

The Mrs. called. I could immediately sense that The Mrs. was mad when she said, “I’m mad.”

I’ve got very good empathy skills.

The reason that The Mrs. was MAD was that Alia S. Wilder had borrowed WilderSUV and gone on a job interview, and had been gone (at that point) over seven hours. I’ve been in long interviews, but that seemed a bit much, especially for a college student without tons of mad job skillz.

The Mrs. dredged up the number of the company that Alia was being interviewed by and I called them. Nope. She left . . . six minutes ago. Not enough time to get home to The Mrs. and watch Pugsley whilst The Mrs. takes The Boy to his Cub Scout meeting (makes me proud to see him in the dark blue shirt, and The Mrs. spent seventeen zillion hours sewing patches on). Since The Mrs. had given up her car, the only remaining vehicle was WonderTruck.

WonderTruck was built back when there was a Soviet Union, a cool video game was “Atari”, CDs were for rich people, and Pamela Anderson was only mostly trampy instead of entirely trampy and all hepatitised out.

WonderTruck is older than most NFL© quarterbacks.

So, The Mrs. trundled Pugsley and The Boy into WonderTruck (I could see the steam rising from her ears from the office) and went off to Cub Scouts. For the record, The Boy loves it, and Pugsley hated Cub Scouts, since he is two and is cranky since his 401k just lost about 10% on some Ukrainian mining stocks.

Alia called me up at work when she got home. I was more than a little irritated at her irresponsible behavior.

Until she explained.

Alia had gone to the first job interview and, tellingly, they would not tell her what she would be doing, but yet assured her that most people in the job make about $40,000 a year. Some make $100,000. Now, as to people who have yet to graduate from college making that kind of scratch, well, I get suspicious. Some Eastern European nations don’t have that as a gross domestic product (the gross domestic product of a nation is the sum of all goods and services produced by said nation, excluding Pez™ manufacture) of $100,000.

Oh, sure, you’re saying, “$100,000, that’s like $6.57 Canadian” but even as our currency drops to the point where we’d better off wrapping presents in $100 bills than giving them as presents, $100,000 would still wrap a heiney-load of presents.

Alarm bells began ringing for The Mrs. and I. If it sounds too good to be true, it always is, unless the “it” in question are the new episodes of Dr. Who. We quizzed her after her interview, and were quite skeptical. Outside of being a politician, there are very few jobs that involve people throwing money at you and expecting just a vote or two. Very few people who aren’t college graduates make that kind of cash, except Bill Gates, who makes $40,000 each time one of the trillions of skin cells he has sloughs off.

Alia got to the job interview, and they told her to get into a car, and follow them while they showed her the job.

Door to door sales. After about ten minutes she told them she’d like to go home. “No, we’re out here, we’ve got to get our work done,” came the answer from Door-To-Door Manager Guy.

She repeated again and again that she didn’t want the job, and she wanted to go home, for about five hours. So, that’s not technically kidnapping, since she could have walked away from the sleazy interviewers at any time. It would have been a lot of shoe leather, though, and Alia has short, squatty legs.

I finally talked to her before The Mrs. got back from Cub Scouts. She told me her story, then waited. I said, “Okay.”

“I thought you were going to be mad.”

“I was, but I kept saying to myself that she’d better have a good reason. Being kidnapped during a job interview is a good reason.”