Spin control
Feb. 6th, 2004 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSo, who knows how that job interview went? Pas moi.
I spent the entire day leading up to it, vomiting. Could have been stress, could just as easily have been stomach-fu. Saturday, around four in the morning, as I was trying to read myself back to sleep (Peter Biskind’s Down & Dirty Movies. Bad choice. Highly entertaining book.) Robin came doddering sleepily into my office. “Kodiak just threw up.”
Kodiak has become a weekend fixture. His mother, a buxom brunette in her late twenties, does something vaguely rock-n-rollish on Friday and Saturday nights. A nine-year-old would get in the way. Every so often when I run into her at karate, she laughs and does something with her hair. “You know, I never meant for this arrangement to become so one-sided,” she says. Her eyes smirk: I’m using you.
“It’s quite all right,” I say, suppressing the urge to go all glacial and Grace Kelly. And, in fact, it is. I like Kodiak, he’s a sweet kid and I worry about him. The much-adored father has fled back to Brazil, presumably to die of his mysterious wasting disease. Kodiak is so sweet natured, he isn’t doing any of that resentful acting out stuff kids do. Instead he seems lost. Robin bullies him.
I followed Robin back into his bedroom and there was Kodiak, lying in his sleeping bag on the floor in a pool of vomit, trembling. Who knows how long he’d been lying there like that? Milo was alternately trying to eat the vomit, and trying to get him to vomit some more by licking his face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Sweetie. There’s nothing to be sorry about. You got sick. You didn’t do anything bad. Let’s clean you up.”
I stuck a thermometer into his mouth, herded him into the bathroom. He felt icy to the touch but the thermometer was reading low. Of course that meant nothing: spikes in bacterial activity often coincide with a dip in temp.
“Did you eat anything that tasted weird to you?” I asked.
He shook his head: no. He was clearly mortified. I’m sorry I was born, read the subtitles. Only the person who was supposed to be watching the movie was elsewhere, in a stranger’s bed, sleeping off the garage band fantasy.
The next morning it was Robin hurling chunks.
Some stomach virus making the rounds.
I wondered how my phantom interviewer would respond if I threw up all over his conference table. “I’m sorry I was born,” I could tell him. “I’m a square peg and there are too many round holes. Really, I should just arrange to get myself hit by a car, die instantly and painlessly. That way we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.”
Instead, I waited ten minutes in the holding area, watched the interviewee before me – a young man in a gray, herringbone suit – march briskly toward the elevator. A moment later, my prospective interviewer emerged from the room. Fortyish guy. Kindly face, rumpled shirt. Clearly this was not the kind of work environment that enforced dress codes. Already I liked it. He looked exhausted.
I made eye contact. Waggled my fingers. Cheese!
He sighed. Not a fan of the perky greeting gambit. Led me into – you guessed it – a conference room. An unusually claustrophobic conference room. “I’ll be with you in one moment. Just want to get a glass of water.”
Nary a picture on the walls, and on the table a thick, green, bound, soft-cover book. A compendium of every production and distribution biz in the entertainment industry, how much money they’d generated over the course of the past decade, how much debt they staggered underneath and all manner of clever ratios juxtaposing liquidity estimates to efficiency ratings. The company’s bread and butter. I find stuff like this very fascinating – numbers tell a story if you let them, though most people’s eyes glaze over as a sheer autonomic response to endless rows of figures. Not mine though.
I’d actually spent the day between bathroom trips putting together a portfolio of relevant work samples. My controversial Salon Blair Witch feature. The market analysis I did for Alcatel when they played with the idea of launching a VOD play in NYC. My valuation of Clear Channel post its SFX acquisition. Unfortunately, I was so spaced out that I’d left in on my desk at home.
Mr. Rumpled came back into the room. “Sorry, I’m exhausted. Just got back from a business trip to San Diego last night, then I drove straight up to San Francisco for a class. Had my cell phone turned off like an idiot, and of course the class had been canceled. Then I drove back and got caught in four hours of nightmare traffic. Got no sleep.” He pushed his thinning hair back over his forehead. “And I’ve been doing these interviews today back to back.”
Not an auspicious beginning to our conversation. What do all those colored parachute books tell you? Always mirror the body language of anyone you’re trying to make a positive impression upon. I ran my fingers through my hair which unfortunately is thick and luxurious, nodding enthusiastically, and launched into volume 2 of True Tales of Commuter Terror, which I know by heart having driven for two years, four times a week, between Casa Chaos in scenic Monterey and the ICM-Breakpoint offices in San Francisco.
An employment interview faux pas, you’d think, but no, he was leaning close, nodding enthusiastically. I was singing his song.
“Listen,” I said. “I actually put together some stuff for you to look at, give you an idea of the type of work I’ve done in the past. Then I decided I’d rather let you focus on talking to me. But can I bring it by and drop it off for you to look at tomorrow. Would you look at it tomorrow?”
“Sure,” he said. He looked bemused. “What do you know about the company?”
“That you specialize in financial analysis of the entertainment industry. That you publish a variety of newsletters aimed at valuation in the areas of telephony, cable television, radio and film investment. That you were bought by Conglomerate X three years ago. How’s that working out?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, it was terrible at first. Just awful for the first two years.”
“A lot of micromanaging?”
“You wouldn’t believe it. Endless hierarchies of executive sign-off’s in order to do the simplest, silliest thing.”
I smiled. “I’m not surprised. They have that reputation. Rather a bad fit I thought when I first read about the deal. Their bread-and-butter is hobbyist magazines. American Birdcall. The Whole Wood Work Review.”
Mr. Rumples rubbed his hands together. “Exactly. The stuff we publish is more-or-less fishbait for the consulting we do which is highly lucrative. If we sell a hundred copies of one of our newsletters at a thousand dollars a pop, we’re happy. But Conglomerate X decided we had to sell a thousand copies. That just wasn’t going to happen. So then they decided the reason we couldn’t sell a thousand copies was because the language we used was too technical, that the problem was we weren’t dumbing down enough. So we went through this period of editorial stupidification. Fortunately, about a year ago, they started ignoring us, leaving us alone.”
Okay! Here is the point at which if there really was a God, he would have descended from his purple cloud to bitch-slap me across the face and scream, “Shut the fuck up!” because the next thing out of my mouth was a big no-no. “Oh, you know they’re only leaving you alone because they’re thinking of selling the division.”
Does not work and play well with others…
Mr. Rumples literally turned pale. “You think?”
My turn to shrug. “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? I mean it’s a bad corporate fit. Plus think how expensive it is to run a business based in Carmel, California. The cost of living is so high you have to pay your employees a lot more than what you’d have to pay them, say, in Burbank –“
He was staring at me terrified. I could swear I saw his hand rise up to make the sign of the cross. “God, I hope not.”
I tried the reassurance tactic. “Well, probably I’m wrong. Hey! Maybe they’ll just move the company to Seaside.”
What other questionable and highly objectionable remarks did I make during the course of my interview? Plenty. But the one that stands out is the one I made while we were working our way through the big green book on the table. “How do you get these ad revenue figures?” I asked. “I mean, most of this is not publicly accessible material.”
“I work the phones,” said Mr. Rumples. “A lot.”
“But I mean – what’s your leverage? You’re essentially asking a company to give you inside information which is gonna turn a profit for you. But what do they get out of it?”
Again, he looked bemused. “I cajole, I plead, I bully, I blackmail. See, here’s the thing: when a company is doing well, they want the world to know about it. So when they turn secretive about profits, the natural assumption is that they are not doing well. And you can use that assumption against them, play chicken with it –“ He launched into a longish narrative about a long-running vendetta he had with an executive at Lifetime! Television For Women. To my credit, I did not immediately start telling him about the Lifetime! Television For Women made-for-TV movie I’d seen only the night before, at 2 o’ clock in the morning when (once again) I couldn’t sleep, although it had been very inspiring, a mother and her anorexic teenage daughter, and everyone was eating again by the time the last credit rolled.
By the time he shut his mouth, he looked as though he was he was going to collapse. This strange dialogue we were having was certainly not your standard job interview, it was following the rules of a particularly intense conversation you might have with a drunken stranger at a bar. So I felt it was up to me to be kind, to end it. “You look tired, “ I said.
He fretted with my resume. “The thing is you don’t have a strong finance background.”
This was it. I leaned forward. “I have a Masters Degree in Public Policy from U.C. Berkeley. The curriculum was weighted heavily toward econometrics, empirical research, interpolative applications of hard data analysis. I worked for two years as a health policy analyst in Sacramento. The ends are obviously different – but I think I used the same processes you’ve been describing to me here. Can I bring you my portfolio to look at?”
“Sure, I’ll look at it,” he said.
So I dropped it off there this morning. Irony is that I know my skill-set is a perfect fit for this organization, but after you spin out of control into the uncharted regions of the right brain, often there's no going back.
I spent the entire day leading up to it, vomiting. Could have been stress, could just as easily have been stomach-fu. Saturday, around four in the morning, as I was trying to read myself back to sleep (Peter Biskind’s Down & Dirty Movies. Bad choice. Highly entertaining book.) Robin came doddering sleepily into my office. “Kodiak just threw up.”
Kodiak has become a weekend fixture. His mother, a buxom brunette in her late twenties, does something vaguely rock-n-rollish on Friday and Saturday nights. A nine-year-old would get in the way. Every so often when I run into her at karate, she laughs and does something with her hair. “You know, I never meant for this arrangement to become so one-sided,” she says. Her eyes smirk: I’m using you.
“It’s quite all right,” I say, suppressing the urge to go all glacial and Grace Kelly. And, in fact, it is. I like Kodiak, he’s a sweet kid and I worry about him. The much-adored father has fled back to Brazil, presumably to die of his mysterious wasting disease. Kodiak is so sweet natured, he isn’t doing any of that resentful acting out stuff kids do. Instead he seems lost. Robin bullies him.
I followed Robin back into his bedroom and there was Kodiak, lying in his sleeping bag on the floor in a pool of vomit, trembling. Who knows how long he’d been lying there like that? Milo was alternately trying to eat the vomit, and trying to get him to vomit some more by licking his face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Sweetie. There’s nothing to be sorry about. You got sick. You didn’t do anything bad. Let’s clean you up.”
I stuck a thermometer into his mouth, herded him into the bathroom. He felt icy to the touch but the thermometer was reading low. Of course that meant nothing: spikes in bacterial activity often coincide with a dip in temp.
“Did you eat anything that tasted weird to you?” I asked.
He shook his head: no. He was clearly mortified. I’m sorry I was born, read the subtitles. Only the person who was supposed to be watching the movie was elsewhere, in a stranger’s bed, sleeping off the garage band fantasy.
The next morning it was Robin hurling chunks.
Some stomach virus making the rounds.
I wondered how my phantom interviewer would respond if I threw up all over his conference table. “I’m sorry I was born,” I could tell him. “I’m a square peg and there are too many round holes. Really, I should just arrange to get myself hit by a car, die instantly and painlessly. That way we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.”
Instead, I waited ten minutes in the holding area, watched the interviewee before me – a young man in a gray, herringbone suit – march briskly toward the elevator. A moment later, my prospective interviewer emerged from the room. Fortyish guy. Kindly face, rumpled shirt. Clearly this was not the kind of work environment that enforced dress codes. Already I liked it. He looked exhausted.
I made eye contact. Waggled my fingers. Cheese!
He sighed. Not a fan of the perky greeting gambit. Led me into – you guessed it – a conference room. An unusually claustrophobic conference room. “I’ll be with you in one moment. Just want to get a glass of water.”
Nary a picture on the walls, and on the table a thick, green, bound, soft-cover book. A compendium of every production and distribution biz in the entertainment industry, how much money they’d generated over the course of the past decade, how much debt they staggered underneath and all manner of clever ratios juxtaposing liquidity estimates to efficiency ratings. The company’s bread and butter. I find stuff like this very fascinating – numbers tell a story if you let them, though most people’s eyes glaze over as a sheer autonomic response to endless rows of figures. Not mine though.
I’d actually spent the day between bathroom trips putting together a portfolio of relevant work samples. My controversial Salon Blair Witch feature. The market analysis I did for Alcatel when they played with the idea of launching a VOD play in NYC. My valuation of Clear Channel post its SFX acquisition. Unfortunately, I was so spaced out that I’d left in on my desk at home.
Mr. Rumpled came back into the room. “Sorry, I’m exhausted. Just got back from a business trip to San Diego last night, then I drove straight up to San Francisco for a class. Had my cell phone turned off like an idiot, and of course the class had been canceled. Then I drove back and got caught in four hours of nightmare traffic. Got no sleep.” He pushed his thinning hair back over his forehead. “And I’ve been doing these interviews today back to back.”
Not an auspicious beginning to our conversation. What do all those colored parachute books tell you? Always mirror the body language of anyone you’re trying to make a positive impression upon. I ran my fingers through my hair which unfortunately is thick and luxurious, nodding enthusiastically, and launched into volume 2 of True Tales of Commuter Terror, which I know by heart having driven for two years, four times a week, between Casa Chaos in scenic Monterey and the ICM-Breakpoint offices in San Francisco.
An employment interview faux pas, you’d think, but no, he was leaning close, nodding enthusiastically. I was singing his song.
“Listen,” I said. “I actually put together some stuff for you to look at, give you an idea of the type of work I’ve done in the past. Then I decided I’d rather let you focus on talking to me. But can I bring it by and drop it off for you to look at tomorrow. Would you look at it tomorrow?”
“Sure,” he said. He looked bemused. “What do you know about the company?”
“That you specialize in financial analysis of the entertainment industry. That you publish a variety of newsletters aimed at valuation in the areas of telephony, cable television, radio and film investment. That you were bought by Conglomerate X three years ago. How’s that working out?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, it was terrible at first. Just awful for the first two years.”
“A lot of micromanaging?”
“You wouldn’t believe it. Endless hierarchies of executive sign-off’s in order to do the simplest, silliest thing.”
I smiled. “I’m not surprised. They have that reputation. Rather a bad fit I thought when I first read about the deal. Their bread-and-butter is hobbyist magazines. American Birdcall. The Whole Wood Work Review.”
Mr. Rumples rubbed his hands together. “Exactly. The stuff we publish is more-or-less fishbait for the consulting we do which is highly lucrative. If we sell a hundred copies of one of our newsletters at a thousand dollars a pop, we’re happy. But Conglomerate X decided we had to sell a thousand copies. That just wasn’t going to happen. So then they decided the reason we couldn’t sell a thousand copies was because the language we used was too technical, that the problem was we weren’t dumbing down enough. So we went through this period of editorial stupidification. Fortunately, about a year ago, they started ignoring us, leaving us alone.”
Okay! Here is the point at which if there really was a God, he would have descended from his purple cloud to bitch-slap me across the face and scream, “Shut the fuck up!” because the next thing out of my mouth was a big no-no. “Oh, you know they’re only leaving you alone because they’re thinking of selling the division.”
Does not work and play well with others…
Mr. Rumples literally turned pale. “You think?”
My turn to shrug. “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? I mean it’s a bad corporate fit. Plus think how expensive it is to run a business based in Carmel, California. The cost of living is so high you have to pay your employees a lot more than what you’d have to pay them, say, in Burbank –“
He was staring at me terrified. I could swear I saw his hand rise up to make the sign of the cross. “God, I hope not.”
I tried the reassurance tactic. “Well, probably I’m wrong. Hey! Maybe they’ll just move the company to Seaside.”
What other questionable and highly objectionable remarks did I make during the course of my interview? Plenty. But the one that stands out is the one I made while we were working our way through the big green book on the table. “How do you get these ad revenue figures?” I asked. “I mean, most of this is not publicly accessible material.”
“I work the phones,” said Mr. Rumples. “A lot.”
“But I mean – what’s your leverage? You’re essentially asking a company to give you inside information which is gonna turn a profit for you. But what do they get out of it?”
Again, he looked bemused. “I cajole, I plead, I bully, I blackmail. See, here’s the thing: when a company is doing well, they want the world to know about it. So when they turn secretive about profits, the natural assumption is that they are not doing well. And you can use that assumption against them, play chicken with it –“ He launched into a longish narrative about a long-running vendetta he had with an executive at Lifetime! Television For Women. To my credit, I did not immediately start telling him about the Lifetime! Television For Women made-for-TV movie I’d seen only the night before, at 2 o’ clock in the morning when (once again) I couldn’t sleep, although it had been very inspiring, a mother and her anorexic teenage daughter, and everyone was eating again by the time the last credit rolled.
By the time he shut his mouth, he looked as though he was he was going to collapse. This strange dialogue we were having was certainly not your standard job interview, it was following the rules of a particularly intense conversation you might have with a drunken stranger at a bar. So I felt it was up to me to be kind, to end it. “You look tired, “ I said.
He fretted with my resume. “The thing is you don’t have a strong finance background.”
This was it. I leaned forward. “I have a Masters Degree in Public Policy from U.C. Berkeley. The curriculum was weighted heavily toward econometrics, empirical research, interpolative applications of hard data analysis. I worked for two years as a health policy analyst in Sacramento. The ends are obviously different – but I think I used the same processes you’ve been describing to me here. Can I bring you my portfolio to look at?”
“Sure, I’ll look at it,” he said.
So I dropped it off there this morning. Irony is that I know my skill-set is a perfect fit for this organization, but after you spin out of control into the uncharted regions of the right brain, often there's no going back.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-07 06:20 am (UTC)Good luck with the job
And poor Kodiak. I feel bad for resenting those 'one-sided' arrangements. But I do. It breaks the Code. One of Em's friends,after numerous weekends here, has Never had her over for anything, excuse being 'Danielle has to go to church.' Which pours salt in the wound.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-07 07:44 am (UTC)