The Corporate Screwdriver

The Corporate Screwdriver

1 cup complimentary orange juice
1 flask vodka
1 actual Phillips head screwdriver
1 medium sized wooden mallet

Your first info session was for a consulting firm, where you heard the phrase “it depends on the project” answer to several questions of “what do you do every day?” (Which is totally uninformative and weirdly evasive but everyone else around you nods knowingly.)

At the end of your second info session for a hedge fund, you and five recruitees formed a semi circle around a recruiter and listened to what has to be the unabridged version of her life story, trying to figure out if it’s impolite to leave as soon as she’s finished talking.

You’ve made it to your last info session of the night. You’ve been inconspicuously sipping your orange juice and vodka since it’s the only thing you’ve known to help with your heretofore-unsolved hand sweat problem and to help gird yourself for the next sixty minutes.

But now you notice some guy in the front row is wearing a tailored three-piece suit despite the fact that the ad on Dartboard explicitly listed a casual dress code. He’s asking some deeply technical questions about commodity pricing fluctuations, even though the presenter was trying to field questions on corporate culture and company barbecues, and shouting so many follow ups that the recruiter at the computer is starting to absent-mindedly draw small, vaguely Lorenzian circles with her cursor over her PowerPoint slide. But everyone in the audience is sort of held hostage by the fact that they need to seem constantly and incredibly interested in what’s being said, so there’s more serious nodding in the room, brows knit and breathing minimal, as this guy will be damned if he does not receive an offer along with the company brochure at the door.

He’s nowhere near running out of steam so it’s at this point you can reach for your actual stainless steel Phillips head screwdriver and mallet for your self-inflicted lobotomy. But while you’re trying to line up your screwdriver with the neural connectors to your prefrontal cortex, it’s only at this point that you catch a glimpse of the watch of the quite earnestly concentrated recruitee to your left. You’re stopped cold, in equal parts wonder and terror.

It’s only 9:03 PM.

By Keith M. Stone