Although I’ve now been employed at my newest job for approximately a month and a half, I only recently attended a company induction session. As I understood it, the basic concept was to hammer the company’s history into us until we could bark departmental mission statements upon command as if quoting from the Bible.
However, it eventuated that the session would be far more interesting than an ear-hammering borefest. The four of us – all recently new employees – were instructed to congregate outside my work’s building and await further instructions. Although I arrived far earlier than I should have, slightly excited at all the mysteriousness of it all, there was the annoyance of being surrounded by portable toilets.
I’d been away the previous day, and apparently there’d been a problem with the water supply, resulting in my work organising portable toilets due to the porcelain models becoming rather reluctant to swallow their contents down. (And who can blame them?) Still, although the water problem was now fixed, the wafting odour of the portable toilets remained.
One of the other new employees was only beginning on this very day.
‘Are those toilets normally sitting here?’ she carefully asked, not wanting to appear ignorant. We explained yesterday’s problem with the pipes, and she nodded her head, but remained a little unsure.
‘Why are they still sitting here, then?’ she wondered out loud. ‘It’s hardly a good image for the company, is it?’
‘It’s all about showing our commitment to customer service,’ I answered with an attempted air of knowledge. ‘Having these toilets right outside our entrance says ‘Welcome. Welcome, and please take a dump.”
The girl began giggling, but upon seeing my pokerfaced expression, struggled to understand if I had just spoken the truth or not. In fact, her visual reaction was remarkedly like my own when Big Mo recently tried to convince me as best he could that the kindly lady in The Sound of Music wasn’t actually saying ‘What is it you can’t face?’ but ‘What is it, you cunt face?’
The lady organising our induction shortly appeared and lead us into a training room, decked out with obligatory horrendously out-of-date computers. As with all employment-related situations that involved strangers getting to know each other, the four of us took extreme care to make sure we were spaced out from each other as far as possible. Myself and the other male present were able to execute this maneuver without hindrance, however the female members of the team who had no knowledge of men’s urinal etiquette appeared a little confused at first.
The induction from this stage went as I expected it to, but there was the extra spice of answering annoying word puzzles (you know, the kind of puzzles where you have ‘IN STITCH TIME’ written on a bit of paper, and you’re supposed to figure out that it means ‘a stitch in time’). These puzzles are an essential part of any employment-related test, as are annoying and embarassing activities involving being interviewed by a complete stranger, then ‘reporting’ to the rest of the group on what embarassing details they discovered about you.
We were paired off into two groups to answer the world puzzles. Upon presentation of a piece of paper that leered at us with ‘Give me food and I live, give me water and I die’, my puzzle partner had begun taking to looking at the puzzle papers as if witnessing an execution. I was taking the angle of engaging the induction lady with pleading looks.
We sat there for over twenty minutes trying to figure out what this was all on about. The only clue that my wistful expressions could coax from the induction lady was that ‘the answer is something that is neither dead or alive’. I thanked her for her gracious observation and resumed increasing the strength of the headache which had begun to rumble around my forehead.
It was only after the girl sitting alongside me snapped, brandished her pen wildly and threatened the induction lady with violence if the answer was not revealed. We were told that the answer was ‘fire’. I was hoping the induction lady wouldn’t smirk and cause some stationery severity.
It’s these kind of strange activities, however, which some recruitment companies and employers base their judgement for workplace effiency upon. Although usually implemented when new call centre staff are herded cattle-like into an organisation, such group activities are used in many other group focus interviews as well. Never mind that I have near federal government-level skills for customer conflict resolution – I’d much rather sit with a group of three other strangers play-acting we’re in a hostage situation and we need to negotiate to determine who is set free first. After an hour of the hostage game, the interviewers for the activity collectively put their heads in their hands and called the activity off. I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell it all had to do with banking.
In late 2000 I applied for a government job. It appears that in order to avoid an apparent phobia-like fear of being accused of discrimination, all potential employees for this position were forced to undergo strangely basic tests on a daily basis over five days. The first tests were the most bizarre, involving such activities as being given a piece of paper divided into two columns. Each column had identical numbers next to each other – or so it seemed. We had to go through the paper in one minute, and spot which numbers were identical and which weren’t. Those who didn’t score a good enough time/accuracy ratio were told that they weren’t good enough for the position. It seemed near ridiculous that such a complicated job was based upon such a petty system.
Given the current spate of reality TV shows (or ‘wow, it’s so much cheaper to give out a crappy cash prize than waste money on pesky screenwriters!’ shows), perhaps this is yet another avenue for a fly-on-the-wall show. Not ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’, but ‘Who Wants A Job?’
I have to this date secreted what I consider to be a potentially amazingly successful reality gameshow: ‘Mayor’. In this show, a lucky contestant is plucked from obscurity to become mayor of a large town for a day. Hilarity ensues as Darren from Werribee orders a culling of his least favourite racial minority, and in a special upcoming episode, Rhonda from Edgecliff passes a new law that requires all members of the local government to be card-carrying militant lesbians.
Even so, the apparently pointless employment-related games such as ‘Hostage Negotiation’ and ‘Are You A Mathematical Dumbarse?’ suddenly fall into place as elimination rounds on a reality game show. After each round, more and more potential employees are eliminated, until only the ‘strongest’ team member remains. Until a special ‘Worst Ever Contestant Challenge!’ reunion special occurs in the event of falling ratings, anyway.
Perhaps we could convince employment agencies to engage in a contract which sniffs out great employees via a gameshow in the style of ‘The Weakest Link’ – perhaps named ‘The Weakest Employee’. In true ‘Weakest Link’ style, each contestant would huffily tread their way down the Walk of Unemployment and mutter their post-game interview, which of course follows a strict format. Namely:
‘Well, I think it was a bit too early for me to leave. And of course it was shameful, I would have thought I would have been there for a bit longer. I really hope (fellow contestant) wins, because she has nice hair. Oh, and I hope (fellow contestant who has been throwing dirty looks at voted out contestant) gets hit by a train and dies slowly.’
The contestant screenings for ‘The Weakest Employee’ would be interesting to say the least, and perhaps warrant a show of its very own.
Producer: Is there anything important about you that we should take into consideration before we take you on as a contestant?
Contestant: Um… I’m heavily pregnant, will that matter?
Producer: Oh, my word. This is the wrong show for you. You’ll need to go on our show for pregnant women seeking employment, ‘Lactation Island’.
Contestant: ‘Temptation Island’?
Producer: No, ‘Lactation Island’.
To be honest, after dealing with many recruitment agencies, there’s not many I can truly recommend. I’ve had bad experiences with many of them to the point where I started only applying for jobs that were advertised directly by employers.
This was all reinforced when I applied for a job with Microsoft. They were recruiting people for their call centre, and the recruitment agency responsible for organising the jobs had one of those reality gameshow-style group interview evenings that I despise so much.
Grudgingly, I shuffled into their offices and performed menial tasks, but not before playing another ridiculous ‘group building’ game which involved creating a news bulletin from scraps of paper with news headlines on them.
The activities just kept on coming, when they hit us with a jawdroppingly unbelievable fact. A portly female who worked for the recruitment agency looked over the now weary applicants seated around her, and decided to make an announcement.
‘We’ve only got two more activities to go, but I should probably tell you about the wages for this job,’ she admitted. ‘This job pays (piss-small amount).’
Around me, shuffles and murmurs of discontent were most audible. The general consesus was that they had wasted our time, and we would definitely not have come along if we’d been provided with this particular nugget of information.
‘So,’ the woman continued, ‘if you would prefer to leave now, that’s okay.’
With the exception of a handful of bright-eyed nerds, the group of applicants collectively heaved themselves out of their chairs and careened out the door, hurtling forward like a wayward planet through space. As if caught in their gravity, I lurched up and followed them as well.
But perhaps the most bizarre job group interview I’ve had was a position with Optus. For those who don’t know, their advertising campaign centres around an extremely annoying new-age chanty song in the vein of Engima or Enya. If you don’t live in Australia, download the song ‘Ameno’ by Era, and play every five minutes whilst watching television.
I knew that I wouldn’t do well in my interview even before I’d entered their building, because on my way out of the train station I’d accidentally taken a mobile phone from a woman’s hand. In my haste to arrive at the interview on time, I’d only seen her out of the corner of my eye and presumed from the way her arm was dangling out in front of her that she was handing out free magazines like ‘Nine to Five’ or ‘Sydney Weekly’. It would have been nice if she was handing out free Nokia 8210 mobile phones, but unfortunately she wasn’t. She alerted me to this fact with a shrieking voice which notified all pedestrians in a kilometre radius area to this piece of information as well.
So I arrived at the Optus building, and was told to sit in a room while everyone else arrived and filed in. As everyone sat silently thumbing through their resumés and grimacing at spelling errors they’d only just noticed, one of the Optus denizens decided he’d attempt to help us relax a little.
‘Why don’t I play the Optus song while we all wait,’ he eagerly announced as he slid a CD into a stereo system. Before long, that terrible, terrible chanty song that I abhor so strongly suffocated everyone in the room. And again and again. It was on repeat. I was desperate for the others to arrive to save my sanity.
When it was announced we could make ourselves a coffee in the kitchen down the hall while we waited, I scrambled out the door to escape the music. I noticed one of the other Optus employees was already in the kitchen, so as I poured hot water into my mug I offered her some as well.
I’d expected her to politely decline or accept the drink. Instead she looked at me with a shocked look on her face, and said ‘Don’t you know drinking coffee makes you miscarriage?’
Rather unsettled, I scuttled back to the group interview room, which was now filling with terrified-looking people unable to bear the new-age music flooding the immediate area.
Mercifully, one of the Optus people eventually relented, and began the usual spate of stupid group tests. The first game they played was a drawing challenge: the group was split in half and everyone assigned partners, except you didn’t know who your partner was, because you had your back to them. The idea was that one person was given paper and a pen, and the other person an abstract picture. The person with the picture had to give directions to the drawer, in the hope that a replica of the original picture could be produced.
As soon as the activity began, the room was filled with a cacophony of voices, making it near impossible to hear what my partner was saying, as I attempted to draw ‘a looping three dimensional spiral which is coilling around a ladder of some sort’. In the middle of this madness, one of the Optus staff decided they’d turn the CD back on at full volume for ‘thinking music’. I motioned to one of the Optus folk and notified them that I couldn’t hear a word of what my partner was saying, but the flat reply was that this whole activity accurately simulated the volume of a call centre. I wanted to add that the blind stumbling and constant feelings of uncertainty due to bad instructions commonly found in call centres were present in this activity as well, but stayed silent.
In the end, all I could do was draw randomly, because I had no idea what the woman behind me was saying. After five minutes of this madness, we were told to turn around and see who our partner was, and to compare drawings.
I turned around and glanced at the original piece of paper, which was nothing at all like my own drawing, when I heard a gasp from the woman holding the piece of paper.
‘YOU!’ she hissed.
‘What?’ I asked, somewhat confused.
‘YOU tried to steal my phone at the train station!’ she spat, loud enough for an Optus representative to look at me suspiciously and make a note on his pad. Probably ‘potential criminal background – do police check’ or something.
‘I thought it was a free magazine,’ I tried to explain, but she was having none of it.
‘I reckon you’re dodgy,’ she bared her teeth at me, as the Optus man scribbled furiously on his notepad even more.
The woman’s multihued teeth in front of me gnashed wildly. Revoltingly, hey looked like the Sydney skyline at dusk. I resolved then and there that I’d had enough of these ridiculous employment games and there would be no more recruitment agencies or group interviews for me.
So if I’m ever looking for another job in the future, I’ve narrowed the jobs I’ll take to professional insane arsonist (I can light fires and make mysterious phone calls to 000 Emergency: ‘There’s something in the bush just north of the city – give it food and it lives, give it water and it dies’), thief (I seem to be able to steal things even when I don’t mean to), or patronising reality TV show host.
Then again, maybe I could sit at home and write annoying word puzzles all day. There must be money in that.