Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Ah, Northwestern. Fount of liberal education, overpriced alma mater, and what recent data suggests is now a monthly hangout. I went to another job fair today, this time with the intention of hiring tech grads in quantity, but what I discovered was a pool of insight, cool and clear and used by thousands before me. Deep draughts were taken.

The job fair is like the carnival of the damned in the working world. It’s situated in a place between a desk job and retail because, although you’re standing for hours and gesticulating personably, you’re gesticulating about the possibility of holding still for eight hours a day. Do you not see the madness? It’s like a roundtrip ticket for the eighth and ninth circles.

And you see the toll taken on employers, believe me. There are the Happies, usually first-time fairgoers or diehard advocates of meeting people face-to-face and “touching their hands,” who look like they’ve gone to Six Flags seven times in a row. The Junk Hunters seem to exist for the sole purpose of collecting trinkets from every booth within reach, sometimes shamelessly, sometimes according to a complex system of bartering. The Fallen slump into chairs, looking profoundly bored and envious, perhaps, of anybody getting hit by an unmarked van at the moment.

I thought about using my chair today, but then I began walking toward a stuffed toy from the Intel booth, right before veering off to a table full of mints. The best tchotchke of the day, however, was a $50 ticket affixed to my car because, you know, the goddamn yellow parking permit apparently wasn’t yellow enough for the campus fuzz. Quaecumque sunt vera, that’s the school motto. The approximate Latin-to-English translation is this: Don’t forget to call the university police tomorrow morning to ascertain how best they can shove the ticket up their asses. I’m referring here to donkeys, like from a farm, because we’re avoiding vulgarity. Now, the farmers who own these donkeys? They’re fucking retarded.