I can't believe I said that!
Nightmares from the interview front.

By Bay Guardian staff

HAVE YOU EVER heard that phrase, "It's all in the way you say it"? Not true when it comes to job interviews. Read and learn from these tales of woe.

Zorba the not-so-great

My childhood bedroom still serves as a repository of sorts. Yearbook. Night of the Living Dead poster. Gross, pseudo-ethnic dangly earrings. Plastic flamingos, the spoils of boring summer nights driving around in my parents' car.

Among the clutter there are two books, positioned on a dusty shelf, side by side. At first glimpse you might not think that What Color Is Your Parachute? (that sturdy job-seeking manual with its umpteen editions) and Nikos Kazantzakis's masterpiece, Zorba the Greek, would have much to do with each other. Alone, they don't. Together, they make me grimace. Still, I can't bear to separate them.

In 1989 Parachute was a surrogate mentor (learn to make connections, and your résumé: your first and last shot), easing my way from undergraduate life and into what I thought was a lifetime of liberal arts = unemployment.

You see, times were tough in Pittsburgh. Steel workers waited in early-morning lines for a chance to convince pimply managers that they were qualified to bag groceries at the Giant Eagle. My fellow Carnegie Mellon graduates looked for jobs as nannies. My roommate, an accomplished artist, accepted a no-expenses-paid position as a traveling photographer for Kmart.

I was sick with grief. Sick enough to dump my boyfriend, the very one who'd given me his dog-eared copy of Zorba.

The new unfettered me was going to be a talented superstar of ... who knows what. But I did know talented superstars had to start somewhere.

And I was going to make the very best, natch Felliniesque, sales video for some suburban home-security firm.

Twice I took a weathered, squeaky trolly far into Pittsburgh's South Hills and walked two or so miles to the edge of an industrial park that overlooked a freeway and felt like a crime scene.

Twice I convinced my soon-to-be manager that I was an ace with a video camera though I'd never used one. I'd set up the shot this way, I bragged. Get actors to do it that way. Guild? I'll work around that.

All was well. I scribbled down references and waited for glory.

He'll never call my lost Zorba lover, I thought. He was six down on the list. Who checks references, anyway? D'uh, a security company does.

Alas, I'm writing this and not letterboxing. (Melissa Houston)

Eating your words

My first job in San Francisco was waiting tables at a downtown hotel restaurant. I worked breakfast, which meant I was there at 6 in the morning serving Europeans who frowned on tipping. On a typical day this job would devastate me. On a bad one I'd focus on the worst customer and make sure they never enjoyed breakfast again. After three months of this nightmare, I'd had enough.

Still, restaurants held their allure.

The day I had an interview at an upscale Hayes Valley eatery was particularly bad. A long and unrewarding shift downtown had left me ready to spit in food, and when I got home to clean up, I discovered my girlfriend had hijacked my car. No money. No car. And I'd already been on my feet for seven hours ...

The interview had just begun when I lost my cool, leaving the manager and me dumbfounded.

The typical, pointless questions I was facing had me frustrated and depressed at my lot in life. Then it was as if the manager handed me a loaded gun, "What do like about your current job?"

I thought honesty was the best response, especially seeing that I liked virtually nothing about my current job. I opened my mouth, "The management really leaves me alone. I can pretty much do whatever I want and get away with it," spilled out like it was the most obvious answer.

The guy just stared at me, while the most uncomfortable silence engulfed us. He never called back, and I don't eat there. (Corbett Miller)

Paper chase

By August 1994 I was ready to leave the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I had been working there as a correspondent since early 1993, covering anything and everything that moved in a six-municipality region in the suburbs of Philly. The idea behind the correspondents' program was to ready young reporters to move on to full-time positions at medium-size to major U.S. dailies.

That summer, after sending a packet of clips to more than 25 papers around the country, I embarked on what my editor called "Savannah Blackwell – the U.S. Tour," interviewing at at least a dozen dailies across the country, including the Oregonian.

I had gone to high school in Portland, and my parents lived there – and still do.

I met with a series of editors, and the last was the famous Sandy Rowe. Rowe had just taken the reins at the Oregonian, and I knew to expect a tough grilling.

What I did not expect was that she was fond of using a series of personal questions to determine the character of unsuspecting candidates.

"Who are you most like, your mother or your father?" she mused.

I stumbled, thinking that my mother had married three times, so my father probably wasn't the most likely choice.

So I said, "My mother."

And she asked, "Why?"

That's when I blew it and remarked with a laugh, "Because we share the same demons."

The only problem was she didn't share the chuckle. Instead she gave me a stony stare.

Afterward, I shared the story with my mother, who queried, "Why didn't you just tell her that we both work really hard?"

Ummm, good question.

I didn't get the job.

Nowadays anytime anyone asks me anything that might remotely hit on a weakness, I just say that I have a tendency to drive myself too hard. Which is true.

But nobody ever asked me that same question again. (Savannah Blackwell)

Park and rob

The job didn't demand much. I'd be sitting in a little booth posted at the entrance to a downtown parking lot. People would pay me $5 before parking.

The boss hired a lot of punks – including most of my smelly, obnoxious, heavily tattooed friends. Really, he had no choice. Even in burnt-out, postindustrial Richmond, Va., a town where selling your blood was considered a valid career path, nobody wanted to be a parking lot guy. It wasn't the shit pay or the boredom or the broiling summer temperatures or the frostbite winters. It was the robberies.

When you worked at the parking lots, you frequently found yourself looking into the black eye of a hand cannon. For small-time crooks it was an easy hit. There were no cameras, no bulletproof glass, no crowds.

My job interview was short, maybe two minutes. The boss man asked a quick series of perfunctory questions and sent me out the door – "I'll give you a call."

Two weeks later, when it was clear the boss man wouldn't be calling, I started thinking about going the entrepreneurial route: I could rob my friends while they worked at the parking lots. If it was me robbing 'em, and not some twitchy crackhead, they wouldn't have to worry about getting plugged. I could give 'em a share of the loot. Talk about win-win!

Everyone I talked to seemed to think this was a good idea, but for some reason I was too much of a slacker to ever put my outlaw plan into effect. (A.C. Thompson)

Are you experienced?

It was early June 1994, and I was on break from college, scouring the want ads for a job I could walk away from guilt-free after the summer. I spotted one that seemed perfect, even glamorous: "Waiters wanted for short yacht cruises."

Unfortunately, I had never actually been a waiter, and the ad specifically requested people with experience. Undaunted, I rewrote my résumé to include a nonexistent restaurant in Queens and a "country inn" in Massachusetts, both with fake phone numbers.

The next day, I hustled down to the dock where the interviews were being held. Hordes of young hopefuls were busy filling out their applications. Not a good sign. When it was my turn, the cruise manager pulled me into a little side room.

"So, you have fine dining experience?" she asked.

"Um, yeah. At the country inn," I said shakily, gesturing toward my résumé of lies.

"So, which side do you clear from," she asked, with a raised eyebrow.

"The left?"

She smirked. I was correct, but the fact that I answered it as a question was a dead giveaway.

"OK, thanks," she said curtly.

I left in a hurry, mortified by the whole thing. By some miracle, she called and hired me before I even made it home.

It turned out to be the worst job ever – the company banked on hiring naive college kids they could work to the bone. But it also taught me a little lesson about lying: it works! (Cassi Feldman)

Chance of fog

When I was 20, I chatted about the weather with Marty Peretz, then, as now, the editor of the New Republic. This was not as much fun as it sounds. For one thing, he, as chief chatterer, had taken a fairly aggressive position about weather: to wit, that California's climate was so mild, so benign, so stultifying, that no one living in it could possibly have the time or inclination to think deep, New Republic-style thoughts in between surfing or Ultimate Frisbee sessions.

I squirmed, hoping a brilliant rejoinder would find its way out of my mouth. I, interviewee for a job that might or might not exist, was sitting on the couch in his office in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C., preternaturally alert to the comings and goings of his (young male) minions: a choir-boyish Michael Kinsley (then managing editor), looking rumpled, as if fresh from some priestly encounter; and a shaggy-haired Timothy Noah (now a Slatester), wearing a white button-down and too-long khakis in what I assumed was Ivy League high style. My purposes were a bit on the vaporous side – "so you see yourself as some kind of cultural critic," Marty had said with mock graciousness – and I had not given much thought to the weather as a possible interview topic or subject of contention. It did not occur to me until years later that I might have pointed out the remarkable similarity of California's climate to that of the Mediterranean, where the western civilization of which the New Republicans so grandly believed they were the keepers and perpetuators had been born.

I suppose that was the rejoinder he was hoping I would have come up with – or maybe hoping I wouldn't, since what would he do with me then? Hire me to be a member of the boy-claque? That was, I'm sure, the last thing he meant to do, and it was surely the last thing I wanted, though, in the classic manner of 20-year-olds, I wasn't aware of it then. All I knew was that I was immensely relieved to leave that office and step outside, into the sweaty, the stultifying August heat and toward something, somewhere a little ... cooler. (Paul Reidinger)

Ain't no kill fee high enough

I said yes to the freelance assignment knowing my finished article was probably going to be rejected. The hyphen-monikered New York conglomerate that owned the trendy men's magazine was so rich that they could throw kill fees to desperate writers, and their kill fees paid more than I got for published pieces in local newspapers.

I should have said no, because of the interviews. Not interviews with the subjects of my article. Talks with my ever questioning editor, a cranky, bald, bespectacled man who kept asking for rewrites. After one too many phone calls, Mr. Editor decided to fly across the country to "discuss the article" with me at his most convenient time – around midnight at a club on a weekend night. The man looked and sounded like he had just been forced to eat a rotten pickle. This quality was his way of letting me know he liked me. And I don't mean as a writer. I left the club alone.

I'm sure that he did too.

Another week passed, and my deadline arrived. But no article appeared for my editor to "discuss" further, so, under the guise of business, he took to leaving weekend messages on my voice mail. I never bothered to call back, or even contact the accounting division for the money I needed. The next time I came across the editor's name, he was harassing – excuse me, I mean writing a profile of – Diana Ross. Truly, a pair who were made for each other. (Johnny Ray Huston)