I stumbled into another recruitment agency’s reception last week for an interview. Nobody was in attendance at the front desk, so I pressed the bell in front of me.
Suddenly, the enormous vase full of plastic daises in front of me violently divided itself into two in a cacophonic snap. A small head meekly poked through the wall of flora.
‘Yes?’ she peeped. She was so short that I hadn’t noticed her behind the vase.
I was rather taken aback at the unexpected appearance of the small lady, and didn’t quite know what to say.
‘Uh.. uh…!’ I stuttered.
‘Oh, just go and take a seat,’ she dismissed me, waving vaguely around the reception area. I assumed she knew why I was here.
I walked to the other side of the room to a table filled with magazines. Curiously, there were no chairs to sit in around this table. Was it presumed that the target audience of three year old copies of Who Weekly possessed levitation skills? I wondered if they had any positions to fill with such prerequisites. Maybe it really was time to go back to uni, I noted.
Without warning, I violently sneezed. I could tell without looking that it was a chunky sneeze, but I’m never one who can resist taking a sly glance, pretending I’m really looking at something else, and rating my bodily fluid out of ten.
Worryingly, I wasn’t able to award myself with any phlegm-related gold star, as the phlegm in question was unlocatable. Bearing in mind I was about to walk into a job interview, this was rather distressing. I looked around my body as much I could without appearing to have an obsessive disorder, before giving up and deciding to roll with it (which is what the phlegm may well have been doing, if only I could bloody find it).
I turned to meet the receptionist casting a worried stare at me as I conducted a display of interpretative dance in the corner, waving my umbrella around like some sort of cheerleader’s baton. She nodded to her right in a motion that was executed in less than half a second, producing a percussive crack which made me wince. She smiled, obviously having confused people as to the location of the waiting area in the past.
I followed the direction of her crick and found an area featuring a semicircular seating arrangement. Plopping myself down opposite a lady dressed in a skirt that was far too short for my sexuality to handle, I leaned my umbrella against the chair I sat on.
‘I look presentable, don’t I?’ she asked me, without looking up from her copy of Business Review Weekly.
‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘What position are you going for?’
‘It’s a personal assistant job,’ she said. Then whispered: ‘I’m trying to get the right combination of professional and sluttish.’
Nodding, I agreed. ‘I fully understand, I’ve been going for one or two PA jobs myself.’
She cocked her head and looked at me quizzically. ‘I’ve never really seen a man do the professional slutty look,’ she said.
‘Neither have I,’ I admitted.
‘If I were you, I’d go for the arse-hugging pants and profess a secret love of boy bands – most older female managers would go for that,’ she suggested. Mentally, I crossed this out: the little-man-with-big-hair from Human Nature isn’t something I could ever pretend to artistically appreciate.
In my heart, I knew I could never truly pull off the slut component of a personal assistant’s job requirements. Even my most Fabioesque erotic moments are usually rudely interrupted by bodily functions.
‘I don’t think I have enough slut experience,’ I confessed to the woman, whose facial expression markedly changed. Once again, I rued my inability to mentally process the potential effects of my garbling.
‘You haven’t got it together yet,’ the lady agreed, patting her dress to ensure the cleavage was at maximum exposure setting, without exploding outwards. ‘Besides, being a true slut only comes with age.’
I was unsure if I was supposed to agree with her or not. It could make me look quite rude again.
She reached into her handbag and fished around, producing a small bottle of perfume. This was liberally applied to the local postcode area.
‘How does it smell?’ she asked me.
‘It makes me hungry,’ I admitted. I hadn’t consumed anything since last night’s concoction by Adam: chicken, pasta and capsicum masquarading as fully blown stir-fry dish. The odour floating around the room really was stirring my hunger for some bizarre reason.
‘Hungry for what?’ the woman asked, and I wasn’t prepared to answer that question in a hurry.
Instead, I settled back, and played a game that my sisters and I used to play as children. On long car trips, we’d point out pedestrians we saw passing by, and invent their life – concocting up family background, job, what they were doing today, etc.
My youngest sister always played this game in a rather individualistic manner. Her attempts at the game usually ran thus:
‘He’s going home from a long day at a bank, where he works. Going home to his house, where his wife used to live… but now she’s DEAD. And his children are DEAD. All of them DEAD.’
Naturally, today she is a pubescent goth.
Before I got a chance to even ponder a potential ruling out of a disturbingly large amount of family deaths of the perfume woman, a perky lady appeared and called me in to an interview room.
The first thing she did once we were seated was to reel off the job description for the position. It was pretty generic and nothing I hadn’t heard before – until she started swearing.
My ears pricked up out of cruise control when I heard a rather casual use of the F-word. Now disturbed and no longer focusing on the content of her vocationary objective speech, I patiently waited for it to appear again.
A few minutes later, and it hadn’t. I settled back into the comfortingly reclusive seat I’d plonked myself in – and there it was again!
Was my hearing failing me? Things always fail me at job interviews, most notably my ability to piece together coherent conversation. I usually begin to answer a question, then mid-sentence realise that I’ve got a better answer that I can use, and as a result I make noises that sound like I’m trying to utter both sentences simulatenously.
Studiously, I studied the lady’s mouth to give myself confirmation that I really was hearing dirty words.
Then I saw it: she definitely said the word ‘fuck’. Not in the intended context, however. She was simply saying the word ‘function’ in a strange manner, so it sounded like she was explaining in detail all the required fucktions of my potential job.
As the fucktions kept rolling out of her mouth, I began to smile and struggled to keep myself from laughing. I realised I couldn’t hold out for much longer.
Fortunately, the water cooler in the corner of the room was beginning to make a louder noise than my fake coughs to disguise my disfucktion. A loud rumbling was building from within the machine, and the water was bubbling wildly.
‘Is it supposed to do that?’ the interviewer asked me. Treating the question as if it were testing my skills for the job I’d applied for, I told her that I wasn’t sure, but I’m sure it wouldn’t take me long to find out if it was, and that my skills would be enhanced as a result.
‘No, I think something is quite wrong with it,’ she spoke, alarmed.
‘Actually, there is something wrong with it,’ I declared, hoping she would note down my excellent observation skills in her notes.
Then again, it’s not too difficult to determine the health status of a water cooler that’s suddenly begun to slowly flood the room.
After making a shrieky noise that wouldn’t have sounded out of place as a Microsoft Windows start-up sound, the lady grabbed the closest stick-like object and jammed it into the water dispenser, where the leak had emanated. I nearly began to protest because she’d used my umbrella, but remembered that I was at a job interview, and had to sacrifice everything required. Anyway, umbrellas are designed to proteect you from water.
‘Oh… I’m sorry,’ the lady said, as the water continued to flow, although clogged a little by the umbrella.
‘It’s okay,’ I replied. ‘It’s waterproof.’
‘No, the pattern is running,’ she said, a little puzzled at why an item like an umbrella would have its pattern run under water.
Startled, I took a closer look, and saw a giant glob of phlegm slowly being run through the umbrella’s material.
‘Interesting pattern, though,’ the interviewer noted.