I Am Not a Prostitute or a Salesman

Since I’ve been home I have learned about many a thing, but I’ve also been lectured on several topics….. some good, some bad, and some boring as hell. One of the first of these occurrences was about 2 weeks ago when I got a random call for an interview at Northwestern Mutual. So I guess it wasn’t completely random, in the sense that in the first week of June I went to a career fair in NYC (which I slightly described in an earlier post) and gave my resume to a financial rep in New Jersey. She was kind of smug, I was in the more vulnerable position as the fish to her vulture, and once she made it known that there were basically no jobs available, I didn’t really follow up. My advice to her: stay away from a freakin’ job fair if you have nothing to offer! You’re just leaving candidates up in the air like a kid on a seesaw opposite a larger one. (By the way, I just read somewhere that 1/3 of kids born after the year 2000 will have early-onset diabetes due to diets, etc…. that’s my Debbie-Downer PSA moment for the day.)

Fast forward three weeks…. I’m out playing tennis with a friend of mine and come back to my phone and see a voicemail from a local managing director at the company wanting to talk to me, and if we have a “productive short discussion” we can see what happens from there. I guess the lady from the job fair faxed my resume or put it in some sort of screwed-kids employment database. So I called; I was deemed a quality candidate, and we set up an interview two days later. Bottom line, the interview went great, but I had to take some personality test that Northwestern Mutual deems is a great predictor of how successful people in the industry will be at selling life insurance since their retention rate isn’t great. So it’s a lot of opinion questions and how I feel about certain predicaments, and I had to get a certain score simply based on how I perceived myself. Several days later he gets the results and gives me a sympathetic I-just-put-down-your-dog phone call and apologizes that the test showed I wouldn’t be a great fit. He was very apologetic because he said if he could avoid corporate, he would do it and hire me. Whatever, you win some, you lose some…. but I guess the test showed that I might not be a great salesman (which I think is false but bite me, personality test). 

Speaking of selling yourself… my brother, my mom, and I were watching Cops the other night. The officer disguised herself as a prostitute and lured guy after guy along a road in Vegas. After the fourth guy was caught, my mom goes on a two-minute rant about how people are prostituting themselves, and how it likely should not be my career of choice during unemployment, culminating with the brilliant line, “Michael and David, you WILL get herpes, GONORRHEAAAAA, CHLAMYDIAAAAA, SYPHILIS, the clap, warts, and CRABS (to which she turns her hands into pinchers)….” Obviously, she was being sarcastic, but hearing your mother stress the syllables of STDs was a checked-off item on my bucket list.

Another thing that I’m definitely not sold on is the grammar in the English language or more recent translations of the Bible….. the translations are really not well written, it’s honestly like Hooked on Phonics of the year zero. One thing I am sold on is joining Netflix for the first time. Hot damn, I have enjoyed watching movie after movie over the last week each night (I got three more coming in the mail tomorrow!). I also just watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night for the first time. If you are not on the verge of falling asleep and are alert, watch the movie and interpret it however you want…. way ahead of its time, brilliant stuff.

Another random story that I just feel like telling transpired over the last 2 weeks or so. Recently I went to a Yankee game with one of my best friends from home, and one of her best friends who I didn’t know but went to college with her. We went down to the game, and I was kind of surprised how they could be such good friends because the other girl seemed to be acting loud and overly energetic. My friend seemed disturbed by it but didn’t say anything. So on the drive home we drop off her friend, and right when she leaves my friend Jen says, “Oh my God was she loud!!! I’ve never seen her like that before!” I agreed, but we quickly changed the conversation. Fast forward a week, and Jen brings up the topic again, but instead she says after talking to her friend and bringing up how she was pretty loud, that her friend responded that she really liked me and hoped to see me again which is why she was trying to get attention. Just as an aside, when someone says that they like someone you’ve known for 10 years pretty well, it can be kind of awkward. It’s almost like a friend asking how to get with someone you consider a sibling. If anything else happens, which I doubt it will, I’ll let you good folks know.

Hope you enjoyed your Fourth! And better yet, I hope you’re able to remember it. I was sort of in a patriotic mood so I paradoxically started reading a book about the Civil War….I’ll let you know how it ends.