Enter Interview

I’d been sitting in my rust bucket car for 20 minutes (covertly parked beside a dumpster) before I finally decided I wasn’t awkwardly early for my interview. My fingernails were chewed into ragged little nubs and I had started to anxiously yank apart the ends of my hair instead.

A perky receptionist with impressively non-ragged fingernails and grown up looking hair greeted me and sat me down in a sticky leather chair to wait for the hiring manager. Employees strolled by, giving me condescending pity smiles as they passed.

I looked down and realized I had substituted nail-biting and hair-yanking for staple-ripping, and had torn up the entire corner of my resume. Fuck.

I started to feel ridiculous in my too serious suit. I’d chosen a navy coloured disaster with shoulder pads, because I thought dressing like I was 45 would come with the assumption of an extensive work history and insights on adult things like politics and mortgages. And I could tell it was one of those very grey workplaces (full of shoulder pads) where motivation and enthusiasm came to die. People worked here to mail it in, to spend more time at home with their kids, to get a nice benefits package to cover their weekly massages. This was not a place I wanted to work.