The interview did not go well. Actually, that could be the world’s biggest understatement. For lack of a better way to put it and lack of the energy it takes to think more eloquently, it sucked. It sucked a whole lot.
This wasn’t an important job interview. Just a part-time publishing assistant that I thought might make me more familiar with the literary world and quite possibly get my foot in the door somewhere. But the interview felt more like being stuck in an elevator door, with it dinging and trying to close over and over again, squishing my body each time.
It had started out confident enough . A few solid getting-to-know-you questions which somehow segued into the one single question that doomed the interview. The one question that roped me into giving an answer that somehow managed to question and then insult the man’s knowledge of the female generation. Way to go.
I knew right away he didn’t know much about women as soon as I stepped into his office. He was wearing a dark black suit with a dark tie and a dark shirt and sat at a thick, dark desk that sprawled across the room filled with dark art sculptures. He was the perfect picture of a successful male.
And then he addressed me as “Miss Blair” – which every girl over the age of 12 knows is patronizing in a professional setting. Miss Insert First Name Here. Yeah, we don’t like that. If you’re going to use “Miss,” stick to last names.
So from there, it went something like this:
He asked a few simple questions before dropping his bomb.
“So what do you want to do with your life? What do you want to be?”
I smiled at him and told myself to stop cracking my knuckles. Then I looked him square in the eyes. “I know I should know the answer to that because I’m 23, but I just don’t,” I told him honestly.
“It’s fine, you have your whole life ahead of you. You’re young.”
“Everyone always says that, but it’s not really true. These days you have to make it right away or you get left behind,” I told him. “Things have changed. If you want something, it’s not enough to be smart, talented and driven. A million other people want the same exact thing you do, so you have to be competitive, cut throat. Very unattractive qualities.”
“You think being competitive is unattractive?”
“My mother always told me ladies never let on that they are competitive, they never race to the finish line. They simply sit back and wait for the opportune moment to jump in. Some see it as taking their turn, but I think it’s more of a strategy sort of thing. Waiting for the perfect moment.”
“So you think women can’t be competitive.”
“No, I think women have to be smart. I think women have to be smarter than everyone else if they want to be successful.”
“Ah ha.”
In my experiences, “ah ha’s ” are never good.
“At my age, women are obsessed with weddings and getting married. There’s a whole cable channel devoted to reality shows about weddings and women driving themselves crazy over the.”
“What’s the big deal about getting married?”
“I don’t know, it’s not really an obsession of mine,” I told him. “But every girl I know wants to get married now. They want to do it while they’re young.”
“I thought they wanted careers. I thought women your age wanted to take over the world by the time they turned 30.”
“No, that was the last generation. That was our mothers. All the girls I know are relationship-obessessed. They’re hunting for Mr. Right. They’re ready for marriage. They don’t want to end up like their mothers.”
“And what’s wrong with their mothers?” he asked me.
“They’re unhappy,” I said, thinking about my own mother stuck in an office working because her generation decided that if women wanted to be taken seriously, they had to sit behind a desk. “They’re driven, their obsessed, they might be succeessful, but they’re unfulfilled. They sit at their desks all day and wonder what their lives are missing. They’re unhappy. Girls my age won’t put up with unhappiness. I won’t put up with unhappiness.”
Then he just stared at me.
“So you’re telling me you don’t want this job? You don’t want to sit behind a desk all day and wonder what you’re missing out there in the big, bad world.”
I really shot myself in the foot with that one.
“I’ll sit back there behind that desk,” I told him. “I just want to be sure before I sit down that that’s where I want to be. I don’t want to be sitting behind that same desk in 20 years wondering what part of the world I haven’t seen, what I’ve missed.”
Then he stood, shook my hand and told me to go see the world. And he hired some other woman. A woman who didn’t express one single problem with sitting at a desk. And I’m not sure I’m really any better off than she is. After all, she’s the one getting the pay check.
