by Emily Anglin
Adair had generously hired me to work in the POD office (Professional & Organizational Development), within the HR department of city hall, as a professional development resources coordinator, even though my college diploma in human resources that qualified me for the new position was still in progress, part-time. At my interview, Adair had let me make much of my two previous jobs. After completing a university undergraduate degree in theatre studies, and then a college diploma in career counselling, I’d worked for a few years at that same college’s Career Resource Centre, as a career resource advisor for students. After quitting that job, I’d started at city hall, where I’d been working on contract in a low-level administrative role in the mayor’s office when Adair hired me.
I think the way Adair and I met had helped my case: I’d called him and asked him if he would be willing to do an
information-gathering interview with me, to give me a chance to ask him questions about his profession. He later said that this move had made a strong impression on him.
The PDR coordinator position came with a raise and heightened responsibility. Its main function was to coordinate professional development workshops for other city employees. But, with my hire, the POD office was also launching a new pilot project: versions of these PDR workshops would be opened up to the public, and not just to city employees.
I liked the new job. Coordinating was like stage-managing. My role was to plan the workshops; book the expert speakers—authors, consultants, or professors I knew from the college—who led the sessions; book rooms; and promote the sessions. On the day of each workshop, I would greet the participants, make sure the AV equipment cooperated, and see that discussions remained on track and respectful. I liked the sessions that were open to my fellow city employees, but I liked those intended for the public more. Any time members of the public walked into and through my professional world in city hall I felt as though the building was breathing and I was floating on that breath.
My office in the POD wing of the HR department of city hall had one small window overlooking the building’s huge, charcoal-coloured stone mezzanine, where people walk, carrying paperwork, umbrellas, or bagged lunches. The office was small, but it had a door I could close, with a nameplate beside it.
I’m almost certain that my caller initially encountered me at the first professional development session we offered that was open to the public, a workshop titled “The Information-Gathering Interview: Just the Facts, Ma’am.”
I say that she encountered me, as opposed to us encountering each other, because I’d been at a disadvantage on the day of the workshop. My nerves had flared that morning when I checked the registration list and saw just how many people had signed up to come. And most of them did turn up. I stood at the door of the carpeted meeting room, greeting each registrant as they arrived, repeating each name as it evaporated from my brain. I invited people to help themselves to coffee, straightened the sugar packets beside the carafe, and offered Brad, my HR colleague and that day’s speaker, a second coffee. Donna was there too. She was another cause of my nerves.
It had taken some gumption to ask Donna, my former boss in the mayor’s office, before Adair, to come by the session and offer me feedback at the end of it, from her perspective as a communications expert. But she quickly agreed.
The topic of the workshop had been my idea. Though I hadn’t learned the term for it until recently, the concept was familiar to me, in practice. In fact, I got both of my jobs with the city though information-gathering interviews.
It was my friend Kai, my former colleague at the Career Resource Centre at the college, who suggested the idea to me. Before getting in at the city, I’d begun to regret quitting my job at the college. I was applying for jobs indiscriminately and with growing desperation, without a bite. I told Kai about it over a drink at a dark Irish pub downtown.
“Why don’t you just try reaching out to someone to ask for information?” he asked. “Just choose somewhere you’d like to work. Do a search online for someone at the organization who has a title you’d like to have, and then email them to ask if they’d be willing to talk to you on the phone. The key is, they’ll be flattered. Everyone likes being asked about themselves. You can ask them about what skills, knowledge, and credentials they found relevant going into their own position, and what steps they’d recommend to someone hoping to break into that field. It turns the tables, because it’s like you’re interviewing them. It releases the desire, to be chosen by you, inside of them.” This seemed a bit Machiavellian to me, but I was in no position not to try it.
Kai had apparently been right about it; he usually was right—except when he’d said there was no reason we couldn’t go on working together at the college despite our on-again-off-again office romance, which had carried us around the hidden spaces of the college campus, into back halls, and empty classrooms. Once, an embrace was interrupted, just in time, as our elevator opened and our boss stepped in.
What bothered me about the situation with Kai at the college was that it always felt like we were acting, or at least I was, playing out an office-romance script we’d both seen or read. I left the job at the Career Centre not exactly because of the romance. Rather, it was because of what my choice to initiate and pursue it, despite how unprofessional it was—how unfair it was to Kai and to myself—told me about how stimulating I was finding the job. But Kai was a good person, and a source of valued support in my life. After leaving, I continued meeting up with him semi-regularly for drinks or coffee.
My first information-gathering interview at the city had been with Donna in the mayor’s office, where she worked as a communications director. I sat on the phone looking through the rain-spattered window of my apartment and took notes as she spoke. Donna’s laugh made me picture handfuls of diamonds and gold being poured into a mixed pile. I drew sketches of diamond rings in the corner of my notebook. By the end of our conversation, Donna said, “You know, if you’re interested, there’s a position coming up in our office that we’re just about to post. It’s an admin position. But if you’re interested in getting in at city hall, you should apply.” I did apply, and I got the job.
Once I was in the position, installed in my cubicle on a carpeted, brightly lit wing that looked unrelated to the dark, stone halls outside of it, on a quiet afternoon, I picked up the phone and called Adair. I told him I was earning an HR diploma at the college, and already had diplomas in career counselling and theatre studies, and asked if we could meet so that I could ask some questions about his area of work. We met for the conversation. I was starting to feel bad, especially because Donna was so kind, and Adair was so kind. I couldn’t forget how manipulative and opportunistic I’d thought the information-gathering interview had sounded when Kai told me about it, and I felt insincere. But at the same time I did sincerely enjoy talking to them, and I did gather information. It was part of bypassing the bureaucracy, I guessed, to get through to the way things really work—through human connection, the human part of Human Resources. I just wished I felt more human doing it.
The subtitle of the information-gathering interview workshop—“Just the Facts, Ma’am”—had come from Adair’s boss, Ryan. Ryan had dropped in on Adair and me in Adair’s office when we were reviewing the plan for the session. He looked at the mock-up of our poster, with its graphic of merging conversation bubbles, and asked, “Why not lighten things up? God knows things are gloomy enough in this place.” He had a point. City hall was a massive, modern, severe building made of huge blocks of shiny, imported, dark-grey stone—the building’s nickname among locals and employees alike was the Monolith.
“You’re talking about getting information,” Ryan said. “Facts, right? ‘Just the facts, ma’am.’ Make a joke. That’s allowed, you know. Make it like a mock detective story. Have some fun with it.”
Donna loved the session’s title. I met her for coffee to ask her if she’d be willing to sit in on the worksh
op to give me feedback and answer questions that came up that she could speak to. “The facts, ma’am. Just the facts,” she repeated, laughing. It was the kind of phrase people can’t resist repeating if they hear it spoken; they long to play that part, just for a second. And Donna, I couldn’t help but note, was perfect for the role, with her tendency to wear raincoats and carry briefcases, and her curly black hair that hung around her head; she was a combination of femme fatale and hardboiled detective, compounded by the aura of authority projected by her age—she was in her late fifties—and her casual articulateness.
The day of the workshop, Brad, the speaker, and Donna both arrived early, and we sat in the meeting room I’d booked, at one end of the long table, chatting.
The session, expectedly, went really well. Brad came unprepared, with no AV props or a script, but it just became a conversation, and Donna chimed in with great advice, even though she came from outside Human Resources. She was funny and relaxed, easily engaging the participants. A mother of three was looking to get back into the workforce in a new field now that her kids were in school; a quiet woman said she had studied art history and was now looking to get a job in city art programming; a man in his fifties had been working at a call centre and said he couldn’t take one more week of it; a backdrop of hazier faces and voices filled out the conversation with sincere and mutually affirming commiserations, confessions, and expressions of concern. They were a balanced, mixed group, all pleasant enough not to have stood out much in my mind following the session, as I headed back to my office with the box of coffee dregs and the papers on which I’d taken notes about the apparent needs of the public regarding the job search.
I’d thanked Donna in the hall outside the meeting room, with sincere gratitude, and she leaned in and gave me a hug. My mind, as I headed back into my own wing, felt like foil, catching light and flinging it around, as I unlocked my office door, closed it, and sat at my desk. I scrolled through email with unfocused eyes, and then gazed at the picture I kept on my desk beside the phone: a framed black-and-white picture of my maternal grandmother and her sister as teenagers. In the picture, my grandmother stands on a seawall with a fishing rod in one hand. Below her, her sister lies in the fetal position, and one of my grandmother’s feet is planted triumphantly on her sister’s hip, as though the sister is a record game fish my grandmother has just caught. Both girls are laughing, their hair and skirts windswept, impervious to the stormy sea or sky behind them. I keep this picture on my desk in any job because it makes for interesting conversations, and it’s a way of showing something about who I am at work.
I took a sandwich from my desk drawer and settled in for a few moments of glassiness while I ate. It was at that moment that the phone rang. I picked up the receiver on the first ring, thinking it would be Donna calling about a thought generated for her by the morning’s workshop, or Adair calling to ask how the workshop had gone.
“Hello, Office of Professional and Organizational Development. Katherine speaking. How can I help you?” I asked.
“Yes. I have some questions about seeking employment with the city,” a voice said. It was slightly difficult to hear her. Her voice was loud, as though she was holding the receiver close to her mouth, and there was background noise, what sounded like cars driving in rain or people swishing by, behind her. I could hear the metallic coiling of a ribbed cord, like she was calling from a pay phone and shifting from foot to foot.
“Sure. I’m happy to try to help,” I said. “I offer guidance about PD resources, not specific to employment with the city, but if I can help, I’m glad to. What would you like to know?”
“I have a cousin. She’s never worked much, because she’s been…unavailable for work. Could she get a job with your office?”
“Well…that would depend. I generally can’t give information about specific opportunities to work here. But maybe if you tell me about her skills and interests, I can offer some general ideas.”
“What I want to know is…a job for her inside city hall. Would this be possible, or not possible? You can just let me know frankly. I know you’re busy. I don’t want to take up all your time.”
“You see, I can’t answer the question if I don’t know anything more about her or what type of position she’s looking for.”
“She’s highly educated.”
“Okay, great. What kind of job do you think she would be interested in? What field of study did she focus on?”
“She focused on psychology. She has an advanced degree, but now she’s interested in management. She would hope to earn a certain amount of money. Would you say this is possible, or not possible? Inside city hall?”
“Well, I would have to say, maybe possible. But unlikely.”
“Unlikely?”
“Yes. Possible because she’s educated in psychology, which could be relevant to certain types of management. But unlikely because, as you said, she doesn’t have much work experience. But there are lots of things she can do—”
“What credentials will she need to have?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t answer generically without knowing what particular job she’s interested in applying for and what credentials she already has.”
“She has a master’s in organizational psychology. She would be interested in a job as a director or manager. She’s an ideas person. Do you think it’s possible? Or is it not possible?”
“Not possible,” I said. I hated saying it, but I had to draw the conversation to a close and I was not prepared to offer misleading information that would give either this woman or her cousin false hopes.
“Hello?” I said. The dial tone buzzed in my ear, and I realized the caller had hung up.
I came to expect the calls, which came a few times a week, and then a few times a day. Initially, my automatic reaction was to close the door before picking up the phone when I thought it was her, as though our conversations were secret. I felt anxious that if she had been a participant at my workshop on the information-gathering interview, her reaction to and use of what she’d learned there was the ultimate indicator that I hadn’t planned it well, that it hadn’t been useful, and that I wasn’t good at my job. I couldn’t forget that I’d forgotten the names of all the participants I’d met at the workshop. I hadn’t been quite myself that day.
She became increasingly frank when she called, asking, always, that black-or-white question: possible, or not possible? Saying, always, that she didn’t want to take up my time. The fifth time she called, she introduced a new theme, in response to the frustration in my voice when I told her that I didn’t feel that I could help her or that she was contacting the appropriate person with her queries.
“The wisdom of your soul is a pearl beyond price,” she said. “You’re angry because you want to help, because you have a priceless wisdom—a wise spirit.” This expression and variants of it became a staple of her comments when she called, especially when I was curt with her.
The cousin she was asking on behalf of became her sister, then herself—hypothetically for herself, she said. Was I hiring? Was my boss hiring? When I told her I didn’t have the power to hire, she asked if someone she called the boss was hiring.
“Donna?” I asked.
“The elegant one. The higher-up. The one who gave some of the information at the interview. More information than the man leading it.”
“The tall one?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Donna. I don’t know if she’s hiring. But the best way to find out if a job is available anywhere with the city is to look at the job postings on the city website.”
“In the interview when I met you, the woman with the information said the best way to find a job is to call,” she said.
“It wasn’t an interview. It was a workshop on information-gathering interviews.”
“I’m calling because I have some information about myself to run by
you, assuming I were to apply for a job. The woman from the workshop may have the information, but I would argue that a candidate like myself has information too. A candidate like you, with your soul’s wisdom and your ideas. The city needs facts, but it also needs ideas. Wisdom is beyond price.”
“Facts? Ideas?” I said. I didn’t want to discuss my own approach or my own qualities as an employee or thinker.
“Sometimes I think you’re not there to give information, but to hoard it. Maybe you want to keep your pearls to yourself, because you know they give you power.”
“I’m sorry, I have another call and I need to go.” I hung up the phone, opened the door to my office, and went down the hall to see Ryan. Adair’s boss. I didn’t want to make Adair deal with this. He always ended up dealing with everything that came up.
“Ryan’s at a conference. You’re not the only one looking for him, believe me. Can I help you with something?” Jude, the administrative assistant who served all the managers in the office, sat at a desk beside Adair’s office.
“Jude, do you have a number for security?”
“Why, Katherine? Is something wrong? If there is, please let me know. I need to know.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’ve just been getting some annoying calls.”
“What kind of calls?”
“They’re just strange and they’re interrupting my work. I’m hoping to block the number. You know what it’s like.” I didn’t feel like explaining what was going on because I was embarrassed I’d let it go on so long.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” Jude said. “Yup, here’s the number. They’ll block his calls for you. Watch out, though. The spell will just deepen.” Jude was thinking of a theory she had that Kai was under my spell. I’d never bothered to explain that it wasn’t a spell but instead a kind of ingrained pattern that bound the two of us, me to him and him to me.
