Thursday, July 22, 2010

Were we supposed to conclude our discussion today? You must’ve misheard me, which is to say:

Secondhand Rants will return on Tuesday, July 27.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Five weekends ago, on a lazy Saturday afternoon, I paced back and forth in my spare upstairs room, garbed in a full suit as Mad Men played in the background. This was the full to-do, with jacket, button-down shirt, fancy pants. A tie tied correctly, even. The goal wasn’t to pretend to be Don Draper, like when nerds encase themselves in Yoda costumes for a sci-fi convention, though I imagine I may have been the only viewer in a 1,000-mile radius to experience the series in such an authentic manner. No, I was dressed to the nines with a singular aim: to reacquaint myself with how a suit felt, after having successfully avoided one for years. I just happened to be catching up on the third season of Mad Men at the time. The real show? A second round of interviews for my next job.

You know how I gravitate toward plans, so you can imagine the level of prep that went into this process. It began with mulling over pages and pages of handwritten notes detailing my own story–and the new story I wanted to pursue. These were bullet points constructed to address the boilerplate questions. What’s my background? What do I know about the new company? Why do I want to leave my current gig? Strengths. Weaknesses. Expectations. Then came the far more interesting part, in which I tried to anticipate the curveball questions. Tell you a joke? No problem.

Why was the goldfish kicked out of school?
Because he was caught with seaweed.

Obviously I’d pause briefly before delivering the joke to simulate thoughtfulness. Obviously. I also pictured a scenario wherein an interviewer would ask for a second joke, and upon finding the Internet miserly in its offerings, I decided to craft my own backup.

How do you get a penguin into a penguin suit?
Schedule him for an interview.

With a solid meta-joke up my sleeve, I proceeded to indulge my neurosis further by researching the total U.S. population, along with the contrasting densities of New York and Seattle, in an attempt to brace for those brain teasers I loathe so much. Say I had to calculate the cost of cleaning all the windows in Chicago, for instance, or guess the number of diapers purchased by Indianapolis residents in a given year. Using the rough range of population counts in New York City (9 MM) and Seattle (<1 MM), I’d arrive at population estimates for my respective cities, approximate diapers or windows per person, and then work from there.

Finally, I plotted the actual route to the interview site, which happens to be in the same corporate park I’m frequenting now. I had this horrific mental picture of waiting at a red light, looking to my right, and locking eyes with a current colleague. It would’ve been, like, “Uh, yeah, it’s a yearly tradition of mine to break out the suit and drive around the corporate park during early afternoon hours.” Awkwaaard, in a word, and you can bet I mapped it out so that there were right turns only, with as few stoplights and four-way stop signs as possible.

At the end of the day, all these interviews honestly only called for two things: being cleanshaven was important. I also needed to know my shit. That’s it. There were no brain teasers, no window washing estimates, no uh-oh moments during the drive there. I didn’t even get to tell my penguin joke! Disappointing, really. It all worked out in the end, though, and we’ll discuss the aftermath on Thursday. One of the secrets of this site will also be revealed. And total U.S. population is about 310 MM, in case you were wondering.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

This may be a bit uncouth, and tactically speaking I’m not even sure how it would work, but I’d like to have your attention on credit tonight. Let me explain. I still have sandwiches on the brain, since I’ve been consuming the same goddamn one for about a week now, and it’s imperative I close this case file for good. In return, I promise you far more compelling content next week, provided you bear with me this evening. I can’t promise likewise for the week after that because, well, I had originally scheduled a solid block of boredom for those two posts.

I’m going to christen my take on the Italian submarine sandwich as “The Swinery,” a name which should serve equally as description and warning to all would-be diners. My refrigerator, which originally smelled like a refrigerator, transformed into an old-world larder mere minutes after I stored the meats. Think of a pantry in a cellar deep in Tuscan country laden with the thick, heavy scent of salted pork. I realized I don’t even like pork, at least in its most common formats. No ribs, no pork chops, but for whatever reason pork from a deli slicer seemed like a great idea at the time.

This sandwich was also a sodium bomb, and hours after consuming my first one I was still pounding back water after water. The final verdict? B-. I’d cut back on the capicola, keep the capers, swap out the horseradish mustard for light mayo, and select a cheese far more understated than horseradish cheddar. A substantial cheese, mind you, albeit one that wasn’t laced with a condiment you’d find at freakin’ Arby’s. Consider this first experiment in the bag. I’m thinking a breaded chicken cutlet sandwich for this weekend. While I’d like to tell you otherwise, I’m very nearly certain I’ll go overboard again with the initial version. You may be assured of it, in fact, because I’m already picturing smokey bacon, Russian dressing, maybe even scallions. Perhaps that’s the way the trajectory goes, though, when you approach something new. It’s unlikely your first creation will be refined. You knock out the prototype. Get a feel for the spectrum. And subtlety must be earned, rather than discovered.