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job interviews 1
Do I really want to work for these people?, or: this week's job interview
Company: don't know. Mike (flatmate) mentioned they were looking for someone computer-literate. Position: don't know. in fact, I didn't even send in a formal application; I just got the address from Mike and caught the tram down there one morning. No appointment or anything. This is one of those huge glass towers in Queen's Parade. Monstrous building. In the lobby, I noted that the entire building was owned by the one company. They must be worth a lot. I walked right past the guys at the security desk. One of them called out to me; I got out the woodsman's knife that Marian had given me and waved it at them. "It's all right, I don't have a gun," I shouted, and took another swig from the bottle of vodka. In the elevator on the way up, I saw how the Pinhead mask looked - it's great in the smoky dimness of a goth club, but it looks a bit funny in daylight. I slipped it off, but kept it in one hand. The elevator stops at the twenty-third floor; I wander around and locate a secretary. "I'm applying for that job," I mention vaguely. She seems to know what i'm talking about, which is a surprise. "One moment, I'll see if Mr. Grainger is available." While she's gone, I scoot around behind her desk and fiddle with the screen-colours in Windows. Red and blue chequered backdrop. Lovely, although if they use Windows a lot, I may insist that they install 486es throughout - they reboot faster. She comes back and ushers me into this guy's office. He's in his late forties, typical manager-type look, greying hair, suit, tie, cocksucker's moustache and all. He's running Windows, too. Jesus. haven't these people ever heard of Desqview? "I can see I'm gonna have to make a few changes around here," I say sternly, pointing at his machine. I sit down in the chair before his desk, put one motorcycle-booted foot up on his nameplate and have a long swig of Stolichnaya. I offer him some, but he politely refuses. "So. What have you got to offer me?" "Salary starts at fifty-five thousand a year; four hours a day, four days a week for a one-hundred-and-fifty day period; rest of the year is paid holiday, company car - " "It's not one of those huge Ford monstrosities, is it?" He looks embarrassed, but confesses that it is. "We're thinking of replacing it with something a little more, uh ..." "Useable? How about a hearse? You can fit lots of equipment in the back." His expression brightens at this, and he makes a note on a pad. This is a worry; if I'm not careful, this asswipe is going to employ me. "Now, what exactly is it i'd be doing?" He smiles. "Well, as you may have seen, we use Windows quite a lot, and every so often, one of the secretaries will be fiddling with the screen preferences, and she'll do something silly like set the borders, text and background to the same colour. We need someone here to fix this." I sit there, waiting for him to go on. "That's it." "That's it?" This has to be some kind of scam. "I should mention, I'm a pagan. That means I have to have the solstices off, you know, Midwinter, Midsummer, also the odd weekday when the rest of the coven get together." He nods. Fine. "I'll also want to redecorate my office - you've seen the Hellraiser films?" "No, but that shouldn't be a problem." "Black stone walls, lit from the lower edges, chains hanging from the ceiling, floor coated in blood?" "Fine." "Loud industrial music playing most of the time?" "No problem." I'm going to have to do better than this. "How about an attractive female secretary that I can nail to my desk every lunchtime?" He grins, closes his eyes in mute agreement, as if that's what he does. "Oh, hang on, I mean REALLY nail to the desk. With nails." "I think we can accommodate that." Sigh. "Tell you what. Put a copy of the job description on a disk, let me take it home and fiddle with it until I've got it the way I like it, then I'll get back to you." His eyes gleam at this; now I KNOW it's a scam. While he's off getting his secretary to do a text dump of the WinWord file, I steal a few sheets of letterhead from his desk, slip them into my folder. Mr Manager comes back, hands me a disk, shakes my hand as if I'd signed up already, and ushers me out of the door. I can't figure this out. I haven't shaved for a week, my hair's the same length as those guys from ZZ Top, I'm drunk and I'm wearing a T-shirt with glow-in-the-dark copulating skeletons drawn all over it. In the elevator on the way down, I look at the letterhead: BUREAU OF SABOTAGE oh.
Do I really want to work for these people? This time, I got a phone call from Germany. It was some guy called Peter Theander, speaking in heavily-accented English. "Yess, I em dze head of dze Colour Climax Corporation." Uh-huh. "Fee publish magazines off quality erotica." "Yes, I'm familiar with your work - in fact, I have an almost complete collection of your excellent magazine Anal Sex.' He laughed nervously, backpedalled. "I em gled fee undterstent each ozher. You see, viss dze recession in Avstralia, fee can produce our magazines dzhere viss much more cost-effectifness. I fill be flying out dzere in a few days time, and fee would be interested in offering you a chob." He hung up, and I was tempted to call Telecom and have our number changed then and there, but I knew it wouldn't stop him. The bastard of it was, if I didn't at least go to the interviews, the Department of Social Security would think I wasn't seriously looking for gainful employment. One of his flunkies called later that week, arranged an interview in the city, in fact, just up the road from the department of defence where I'd once installed and bug-fixed a Macintosh that was having trouble with its video frame-grabber (that was a simple problem; I just removed a few of the unnecessary INITS they were running). The offices were not what I'd expected, neat, sterile, efficient. I'd expected, somehow, semen-stained mattresses under bare light-bulbs. Then again, they wouldn't have that sort of thing in their head-office, would they? Mr Theander was a completely normal-looking gent (for a pornography magnate), mid-to-late forties, neat charcoal-grey business suit, pale tie. His desk was amidst dozens of others which hummed with activity, all of it to do with stock, papers, orders, invoices, and the like. They could have been running Sports Illustrated for all I knew. I sat down in the chair on the far side of Theander's desk, adjusted my Pinhead mask slightly, regarded the man over the nails that ran along the ridge just below my eyes. It didn't seem to put him off, and his accent had improved noticeably since we'd last spoken. "One of my assistants is something of a bulletin-board user, and she's seen quite a bit of your work in various places. We are always on the lookout for people to write for us-" "You mean, that text that goes with the pictures, in four languages?" He smiled. "Yes. It can't have escaped your notice that some of our corporation's earlier efforts were ... how should I say ..." "Lame?" I offered. He grinned tolerantly. I wondered if I should produce that syringe of water I had stashed in my pencil-box and shoot up here and now, or wait until he offered me obscene amounts of money. "You would be collaborating with the translators; you see, together, the four of you will devise scenarios, which we then shoot photos to go with; then, together, you four write the text which will accompany them." He spoke into a phone in rapid-fire German, those twenty-syllable words that had given me so much trouble when I'd once tried to translate the text in those A3-format Editions C books of HR Giger's artwork. From somewhere behind me came three girls, each far too attractive to be models for Theander's magazines. He gestured to them. "This is Marie-Therese, the French translator," a slim girl with long, dark-brown hair, a heart-shaped face and eyebrows that almost met, dressed in a double-layered black georgette bias-cut skirt with a wide corset-style waistband in leather (where the hell did that description come from? What I know about fashion, you could store in my modem's S-registers!); "Anya, our Danish translator," a woman about my age, bowl-cut blonde hair, a floral dress, somewhat the way I imagined what's-her-name, the Dutch woman in Gravity's Rainbow to be (why couldn't I remember her name? It can't have been that long since I read that book), "and Angela, our German translator." There was no way on EARTH that this girl could have been old enough to work in this line; she was sixteen if she was a day, short black hair, loose baggy T-shirt with two small indentations where her breasts should have been, and -this is the first thing that tipped me off - black lycra bike-shorts underneath the T-shirt. Argh. I resisted the temptation to gnaw my knuckles. Besides, wearing this Pinhead mask didn't allow that action. Theander was talking about wages, working conditions, superannuation, health and dental funds; I was only listening with one-third of my concentration. One-third was exchanging meaningful glances with Angela. A phone call came in for Theander; Marie-Therese and Anya went off to discuss something between themselves, and I took the opportunity to ask Angela something that had been bugging me for years. "I once read, in one of Mr Theander's magazines, a German phrase: Es war einfach sagenhaft..." She smiled, closing her eyes demurely. "That would be `it was simply fabulous' or `it was simply incredible' ..." she replied, her slight accent sounding somehow sensual, when in Theander it made him sound like an extra from Hogan's Heroes. I smiled back at her, before realising how close they'd come to trapping me. Think, you fool, think. Theander finished his phone call. I stood up hurriedly, blurted the first thing that came into my head. "This sounds like wonderful work, and I'm sure I can, ah, perform the duties you've outlined, but I'll have to speak to a publisher in, uh, New Jersey. I'm under contract with them, and I'll have to make sure that I'll be allowed to write for your corporation." I began backing away from the desk. "I don't anticipate any problems ... so, ah, I'll call you in a few day's time." I made it to the elevators and escaped. When I got back to the reassuring squalor of our flat, I changed the answering machine message.
Ring, ring. Ring, ring. Ring, ring. (One more, and the answering machine will pick it up.) Ring, ring. Ring, ring. (damn!) ring, ring. (argh) "Hello?" "Hello? Could I speak to nikolai kingsley?" (pause) "You're not from Encyclopedia Britannica, are you?" "No, I'm with Hewson Rubber Devices, incorporated. We make sexual aids, and we're looking for someone to work in our R&D department. A knowledge of AutoCad would be useful, but not essential, and you get to play with all manner of inflatable -" <click>
<beep> <rewind, rewind, rewind, beep> <hiss, beep> "This is Mike's flat. nikolai lives here sometimes. We're not in at the moment, so please leave a message." <beep> "Hello? My name's Alan Watson, I'm with Playboy Australia, we'd like to speak to Mr kingsley about writing an S&M column for us. He can call me back on double-six three, one three double four. Thanks." <beep> "Good morning, it's, (pause) quarter past eleven, thursday the fourteenth, my name is Claudia Miller from the State Library. I'd like to speak to nikolai about working in our Pnakotic Scripts department - a friend of mine mentioned his name in relation to the Greek translation of the Necronomicon. Could he please call me on eight-two-oh, one oh double four? Thank you." <beep> "Uh, hi guys, this is Loki, do you mind if i come over tomorrow and borrow your printer? I promise I'll buy a new stack of paper for it. Thanks, guys." <beep> "Hello? Hello? I guess there's no-one there ... uh, my name is Joseph Morrisey, I'm the personnel manager at the Bank of Melbourne. We'd like Mr Kingsley to contact us with regards to a position we have, disposing of slightly torn one-hundred dollar bills. The number here is six double-nine three triple-two. thank you." <beep> "Hello ... hello ... this is Sean ... hello ... hello. Oh. Okay. Goodbye." <beep> <rewind, rewind, rewind>
I've had enough. I only went down to the CES to play with their touch-screen job-search system. I didn't want anyone to think that i was looking for a job. I planned on getting out of there before anyone I knew saw me. The screen I went up to had this on the display: HAWTHORN EAST (The actual address was two houses down from where I live) WANTED: GRAPHIC ARTIST TO DICK ABOUT WITH OVERPOWERED MACINTOSHES, FLATBED COLOUR SCANNERS, LASERPRINTERS, FRAME GRABBERS AND OTHER EXPENSIVE FUN STUFF. MUST HAVE FAILED SECONDARY GRAPHICS COMMUNICATIONS AND HAVE OWN BETAMAX VCR. I visited the bank after that, withdrew twenty dollars, then to the hardware store. They didn't have what I wanted, but I settled for buying a pickaxe and then borrowing a sledgehammer to bash the pointed metal part off the end. Then I visited the address where this wonderful job was on offer. The young man (with his ponytail and his expensive shirt-sleeves rolled up and the aroma of pipe-tobacco) greeted me by name, saying that he was wondering when I'd turn up. I didn't even deign to ask them WHY they were setting up such obvious traps for me; I simply beat him to death with the pick-axe handle. Then I beat the other two artists to death. Then I smashed the screens of every computer in sight. Then I bashed their CPU cases open, hit them until I could see the hard drives and bashed dents in the top of each. I rubbed the broken, bleeding faces into the keyboards, covered every flat surface with spray adhesive and ignited it with a cigarette lighter that Mr Ponytail had dropped after the first blow. Then I crossed the road and called the fire brigade. I think that interview went better than the others did. |
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