Notes from the Office

Do you ever get distracted at work?  I'm afraid I did, this morning, perhaps just a little.

Today, you see, for my sins I was given the task, inevitable, I suppose, when one works in Human Resources, of interviewing job candidates. Now, within the august halls of Golden Handcuffs Consulting Amalgamated International, we don't do just any old kind of job interview. Oh, no - we have a thoroughgoing, most-of-the-day candidate overview, one that involves a whole battery of tests created by some of the most devilish brightest minds in industrial psychology (an entire field about which I knew not a blessed thing before my transfer last summer).  As a result, we tend to spend a fair amount of time with each candidate.

One element of this ordeal is an interview in which two of us pair off to pummel the poor, unwitting job seeker with questions for an hour or more. Not usually terribly interesting, frankly, and on a Friday generally something to get through on the way to lunch and the prospect of a spring weekend only a few hours hence.

Ah, but today...

Today, you see, we had a candidate who answers the burning (but as far as I can tell hitherto unasked) question "What would onetime Hollywood heartthrob Rod Taylor have looked like if he was just a shade (or ten) better looking, better built, and more charismatic?"  The answer, in the flesh (and a tidy suit), strode into the interview, all six-foot-three or so of him, and I spent the better part of the next hour mostly trying not to gawp. My colleague, a rather mousy and untidy lady of uncertain age in a shapeless gray dress of a type best described as "serviceable" (she refers to it as "my spring best," which is not encouraging in regard to the rest of her wardrobe, really), seemed quite immune to his charms and plowed through her queries about his work, his education, and his hopes, dreams, and fears.

I meanwhile, tried with only middling success to decide if it were really possible that he had decided to store his lunch of fresh pieces of fruit in the crotch of his well-fitting trousers. Also, whether I could get away with asking about hobbies and extracurricular activities in a way that would be both enlightening and insinuating. Being a professional, of course, I refrained, and if our handshake at the end was just a shade more enthusiastic than was strictly necessary, well, I was just trying to make the dear boy feel at home.

When we went to tally up our various scores for the day, I was quite relieved that mine were if anything more restrained than Mousy Colleague's, so apparently I wasn't entirely overcome with an inappropriate reaction to such a rare specimen (our candidates more normally tend toward the earnest but undecorative; I'm sure you know the type).  If all goes well, he'll be joining us in the near future, and now my task is clearly going to be finding a way to insure that he gets a hearty and lengthy training rotation in, I'm sure you'll be not at all surprised to hear... Human Resources.

Well, it never hurts to have something ornamental around the office to concentrate on, does it?