the shrewdness of apes

for a truly surreal experience, try interviewing people for your own position at work. after about the 3rd one, you have to start finding ways to entertain yourself by coming up with different ways to say the same thing and prod people into giving answers with any sort of discernible meaning beyond vague platitudes and generalizations. some people are just complete dead conversational weight. attention interviewees - if you can't even be bothered to make yourself sound interesting what chance do you think you have?

it also becomes very easy to be distracted by staring at someone's face for too long, which i think you're supposed to do in order to convey that you're listening. it's hard to pay attention when your brain keeps interrupting with questions like "wait, which of his eyes is the good one again?" and "does he realize he has that whitehead on his chin?" and "do you really want to hire someone who looks to be one bad chromosome away from the Coney Island freak show?" it seems unfair but those sorts of things certainly enter your thought process when trying to differentiate among numerous qualified candidates.

strangest experience so far: one gentleman of Haitian/Dominican descent was talking about his mother who is a lawyer. i think he was talking about some of her clients when he uttered the phrase "i'm no racist, but..." before describing the fact that he found some of them unsavory, which i guess was part of his reason for shunning the profession. set aside that those are words that should never be used in an interview setting, and instead focus on the fact that i believe he was talking about black people while he himself is black (granted of West Indian origin rather than African-American - still the histories aren't all that different). what was i to make of such a statement? race would have never entered the equation if he hadn't brought it up, but now i was left with a number of unanswered questions - none of which i could ask. i think it took me 20 or so seconds to stop trying to figure out exactly what had happened and move things in a new direction.

another guy responded to my "fun" question regarding his favorite place he's ever visited by doing everything but offering me a time share in the Caribbean. then he sent an e-mail thanking me for my time (which scored points) but added a P.S. that read: "On a side note you were deciding what to do for your vacation, and I threw the idea of the Carribean as a good choice. Well the best way for you to experience what the Carribean has to offer (since you never been there) would be a cruise. Carnival have cruises that go to several different islands in one trip. From the things I heard and pictures that I've seen from family and friends that went on a Carnival cruise trust me you will not be disappointed. Check out there website www.carnival.com". hilarious, and i'm not just talking about the questionable grammar. i guess he didn't count on "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" being among my favorite peices of writing.

two more left for tomorrow. would that they were a bit more dynamic but i'm not getting my hopes up. one guy name dropped Marist College in the first sentence of every paragraph of his cover letter. but the other guy is another Geography major who abandoned his field of study soon after leaving college so perhaps there's a chance for some interesting conversation after all.