We want to thank you

We want to thank you for coming in today and yesterday, too. Thank you for wearing your fancy clothes and joining us on this very hot day in our very hot office and complementing all the ladies in their dresses and noticing that we decorated the space with expensive hanging plants. Why don’t we start by having you tell me a little bit about yourself. It says here that you’re from the Midwest. What was it like to grow up in an affluent suburb where everyone took AP classes and dropped out of college to run startups that sold for millions? You seem nice, though, and we appreciate your effort and all the lies you told to be here at one in the afternoon or three - the cable man, the doctor,  the imagined train delays. You’re quite creative -- a storyteller! We like that. Especially since we know you are, historically, a horrible liar; that you told your mom the first time you smoked weed on the playground with the neighborhood drug dealer.

We acknowledge that you made sacrifices and took time and broke your shoes crossing under the highway on the way home and maybe we could reimburse you for cab you had to take. Or perhaps we could revisit the moment you found out someone died and you could mourn them, like you wanted to, instead of smiling with lipstick on your face, and we know it took real heart for you to sit still and present your vision for the role and ask us about the tools we use for data collection and yes, is is important to have measureable objectives. I noticed on your LinkedIn page that you were a poet. Your old boss said you intimately understand workflow; she also said you used to spend the afternoons in her office talking about ghosts and what happens when you die. Tell me about the system you created to manage competing priorities. We know that It’s a hard job to ask favors of people. You said people trusted you - that maybe if you made them work Saturday, they could spend Thanksgiving with their family … but maybe not, because there are, as you know, things that need to get done, and the client - this client in particular - is British and doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. You understand.

Let’s take a moment for you tell me a bit about why the hell you are here in a pencil skirt with your legs crossed at the ankles talking about productivity and workflow and promising me that you know how to manage projects and people when we all know - I know - that you just want to sit in the woods with your husband’s hand near yours and sip the tea that you love and eat the blueberries you picked and type on your goddamned gorgeous typewriter.