"Would you describe yourself as a 'people person'?"

I’ve had a lot of email and comments demanding a full accounting of The (Most Recent) Job Interview. Please understand that I haven't been talking about it much primarily because of the Driver’s Test Theory, which may be summarized as follows: If you don’t tell anybody you’re about to take your driver’s test, in the event of failure you are thus safeguarded against the utter humiliation of explaining to the world why you can’t triumphantly pilot your own way to the evening shift at the Dairy Queen. But if you shut your trap about the whole thing, and pass it anyway, you have earned eight whole glorious minutes of rolling up to the drive-thru window bathed in a surprise patina of station wagoned glory. It takes a whole lot of the crap out of a crapshoot.

Then again, not a soul knowing I was taking my driver’s test provided absolutely no comfort when I failed it because of some stupid rule about making a right-hand turn while in a left-hand lane. The DMV is so nitpicky.

Because I am an enormous dork, I volunteered for this guy's first Congressional campaign as a senior in high school, and also because I am an enormous dork I thought it was great fun. In those days his headquarters consisted of a tiny drywall shack behind a wallpaper store, because when you need to instill confidence in the electorate, what you want is a whole lot of little upholstery squares within easy reach. And now his headquarters is the constituent’s office in the biggest skyscraper in town, which has a whole entire mall inside, and if that is not Making It in America I don’t know what is.

The interviewer—I still don’t know what his title was; Head Minion, perhaps—talked to me for an hour and a half, which frankly is far longer than most of my major relationships with the opposite sex. Granted, an hour and twenty minutes was dedicated to (please don’t ask how we got on this topic) what it was like for his father to grow up on a diary farm in Vermont, milking cows at the buttcrack of dawn.

I assumed this was some sort of test, and so I listened carefully and also took notes (“waking up at buttcrack of dawn to milk cows=bad”) but then he started asking me about my experience, which was largely an educational moment for me, since it afforded me the opportunity to learn that when people want to know about your experience it is probably not a good idea to begin with the words “When I was in high school.”

I’m glad I went, if for the sole reason that it solved utter mystery of why these people even wanted to talk to me. I couldn’t understand it; I have absolutely no Hill experience and my most viable professional political experience consists largely of snickering whenever Ted Kennedy attempts to speak without slurring (this appeared on my resume as “participating in political roundtable discussions with major media figures.”) I figured they invited me in as a curiosity, because let’s face it, who doesn’t want to see, live and in person, a woman who conducts a phone interview in the midst of supposedly attending to her current job, a job located in a building in the midst of a hurricane evacuation.

But Head Minion kept saying, “We’re looking for someone with great depth of experience, someone who’s been out in the world and has experience with more than one industry to bring to the table.” By which he meant: “Dear District: You have elected, as your representative to the United States Congress, a person who demands, as a prerequisite for becoming his press secretary, a minimum of four month’s experience of selling roses in bars.”

All told, I think it went pretty well, if you excuse the fact that my final words to Head Minion, his very last impression of me, consisted of, “Have a great weekend!” which wouldn’t have been so bad were it not nine-thirty in the morning on a Monday.

What it comes down to is this: They’re narrowing the field to six candidates, three with a lot of legislative experience (the Not Me’s) and three with—apparently, resumes sparkling with such entries as “Sewer System Describing Hack.” In the next couple of weeks, the Congressman will decide which direction he wants to go (“What do you think, you guys? Do I hire a competent person, or somebody who went to work at a guest ranch in Colorado during college and then ran home crying after three weeks because she didn’t like the way one of the cows was looking at her?”) If he goes with the actually qualified people, I am screwed. If, however, he’s been rummaging around the lower left drawer of Senator Kennedy’s desk, it’s between me and the two other incompetents.

I think we can all learn something from this experience. It explains a great deal, for instance, about why we respect our government as an utter paragon of resourcefulness and efficiency.