Interviews We Know And Love

Many of us have had our "Kafka" moments over the past couple of years as we transition, network, job-search, and shake our heads in befuddlement at 2 a.m. Martin Kippenberger, the German artist summed all of this up in a brilliant/funny/sad installation, which I saw before it closed at MOMA last week. Based on Kafka's novel Amerika, the piece is an arrangement of chairs and desks in interview scenes, ones which we can all recognize instantly. My favorite scene: the lifeguard chair and the tennis umpire's chair facing each other.

This got me thinking about a few of my strangest interviews over the past two years. The organization names are fiction, the experiences were all too real:

• July, 2--7, Wash. D.C. HQ, AmEuro Bank: This "bank" pretends to make loans from wealthy countries to poor ones who pretend they'll pay them back. Over lunch in the perfect Dining Room over a customary glass of sherry, my potential host/boss from Sweden and I discuss the job. Instantly, it occurs to us both that he occupies the same upper-middle job I used to have, and that I am there for a job two levels down from him at half the pay. At the end of lunch, I ask him if he is planning on retiring soon. He says no, smiling. The afternoon staff interviews are wasted, as were the dining-dollars in that room, which could have been "loaned."
• June 2008, NYC HQ, Dominant Publications: I used several contacts and survived an HR "screening" to get this interview with their number one administrative exec. He begins, and continues withholding breath like a pearl-diver for fifty-eight minutes, telling me how important he is to the organization (his main task: purchase paper), trashing the previous occupant of the job I seek (one of my contacts). I sit, listening (with little choice), struck by how much his style reminds me of my previous boss, a modestly talented man with an unbridled ego, who could do one thing well: add a column of numbers. I wondered how I could manage to work for this new guy. I would never find out.
• Greenwich, CT,HQ Alpha-Beta Hedge Fund: I had to take two written tests in order to get this interview, which turns into a set of three mini rugby scrums. Two of the first set of interviewers have been in the company less than six months, the third, less than a year. Their average age is about 26. I am their potential boss. The second set of two, one of whom started a week ago, present a logistical problem on a board. I am to solve it with them right now. After I explain the short-comings of the current plan, the interviewer tells me he designed it himself. The last set are senior, but it's already over. Outside, it's ten degrees and I slip on the frozen snow and ice, but my heart is warmed by the thought of never having to return there again.

While we search, we wonder at times where reality and fiction begin and end. You need to remain focused, positive, energized but, we're human, so we must have a laugh now and then.

After all, some of the interviewers probably had a laugh over me.

May Day, Indeed

I awoke this morning, May Day, to find that in addition to being the owner of two Jeep vehicles, I was now an owner of the company that made them, and a guarantor of the company's warranties for millions of fellow citizens.

I obtained my red Wrangler in 1996 from Chrysler, Jeep's parent. Two years later the company was bought by Daimler, the German manufacturer of Mercedes Benz among other vehicles. After the Germans became totally flummoxed by Detroit's ways, Chrysler passed into the hands of something called Cerberus, a private equity firm. What were they thinking? Daimler, famously, had actually paid Cerberus a couple of billion to take the thing off their hands.

After all of that, who might be dumb enough to buy the company from Cerberus? C'est moi.

And who will my new partner be in this venture, you may ask? Fiat, an Italian motor company. If Chrysler had grown up in Europe, it would have been Fiat, a near hapless organization controlled by the European equivalent of the Fords, the Agnellis. Fiat and the United Automobile Workers union will run this new entity after it emerges from a forced bankruptcy. Taxpayers will be junior partners, which gives new meaning to the concept of "junior." What German efficiency could not do, Italian design will do?

Let's face facts: Chrysler, and GM too, have not really been capitalist entities for some time; they have been social and political entities, small welfare states. Congress, especially the Michigan delegations, have protected these welfare states for decades. The bankruptcy and worker, taxpayer, Fiat ownership merely concedes this truth. Obama's excoriating of holdout bondholders cements the end of capitalist Detroit. Those bonds were owned by non-UAW union pension funds, 401K accounts, etc, but who cares when you're talking about political theatre.

As it happens, someone slammed into the rear end of our other Jeep, a 2000 Cherokee, this week. I have just reminded my insurance company, that, since we now own Jeep together, it's in our best interests to make sure that the settlement is more than eminently fair.

Don't you agree, Comrades?