Claw Your Way To The Top

by Dave Barry

  Chapter Two. Getting A Job

  In this chapter, we’ll take you step-by-step through the job-hunting process, starting right at the beginning.

  Birth

  This is the time to start preparing for your business career. You can bet your little navel protuberance that the other babies are preparing, and you don’t want to fall so far behind that they wind up as vice-presidents and you wind up serving them food and wearing a comical white hat in the corporate cafeteria. In fact, I’d recommend that you start preparing before birth, except that you’d have trouble seeing the flashcards.

  The flashcard procedure is as follows: you lie on your back in your crib, and your parents lean over you and hold up cards, each of which has printed on it a basic fact that will help you succeed in business. As your parents show you the card, they should read it out loud in a perky voice, as though they are just having the time of their lives, and you should indicate comprehension by waving your arms and pooping.

  You should spend as much time with the flashcards as possible. Ideally, you’ll reach adolescence without ever once getting an unobstructed view of your parents’ faces. As an adult, you’ll carry around a little wallet card that says “7 x 9 = 63,” because it will remind you of Mother.

  Preschool

  Look for a strong pre-business curriculum, one that emphasizes practical activities, such as blocks, over liberal-arts activities, such as gerbils.

  Elementary School

  This is where you should learn to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, which are skills that are essential for filling out expense reports; you should also develop lifelong chumships with anybody whose name ends in “II,” or, even better, “III.” You might also consider learning to read. This is not really necessary, of course, inasmuch as you will have a secretary for this purpose, but some businesspersons like to occasionally do it themselves for amusement on long airplane trips.

  High School

  The point of high school is to get yourself into a good college. The way you do this is by being well rounded, which is measured by how many organizations you belong to. Many college admissions officers select students by actually slapping a ruler down on the list of accomplishments underneath each applicant’s high school yearbook picture. So you should join every one of the ludicrous high school organizations available to you, such as the Future Appliance Owners Club and the National Honor Society. If they won’t let you into the National Honor Society, have your parents file a lawsuit alleging discrimination on the basis of intelligence.

  Another thing you need to do in high school is get good SAT scores, which are these two numbers you receive in the mail from the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. They have a whole warehouse filled with numbers up there. To get yours, you have to send some money off by mail to Princeton, then you have to go sit in a room full of other students with number-two pencils and answer questions like “BRAZIL is to COMPENSATE as LUST is to ...” Then you have to look at the various multiple choices and try to figure out what kind of mood the folks up at the Educational Testing Service were in on the day they made up that particular question.

  Nobody has the vaguest idea anymore how this elaborate ritual got started, what it has to do with anything in the real world, or how the Educational Testing Service decides what numbers to send you. My personal theory is that it has to do with how much money you send them in the mail. I think the amounts they tell you to send are actually just Suggested Minimum Donations, if you get my drift.

  College

  College is basically a large group of buildings, usually separated by lawns, where you go to major in business. This means you must avoid:

  Courses where you have to trace the Development of something, such as the Novel. Courses that involve numbers that cannot be categorized as debits or credits, such as “square roots.” Courses involving a foreign language, such as French (this also includes courses involving funny-sounding English, like in those old plays where everybody is always saying: “Whatst? Dost thou sittest upon mine horst? Egad!” etc.). Any course involving maps, the Renaissance, or specific dates such as “1066.” Any course where you sit around a classroom trying to figure out what the hell Truth is.

  What you want to take are courses that have the word “Business” in them somewhere, such as Introduction to Business, Getting to Know Business a Little Better, Kissing Business Right on the Lips, etc.

  Graduate School

  There are advantages and disadvantages to going to graduate school. The main advantage is that if you go to a really good graduate school, like Harvard, you’ll have a very easy time finding a good job. At night, as you lie in your bed, your window will often be broken by stones, around which have been wrapped lucrative offers. The main disadvantage is that you couldn’t get admitted to Harvard even if you held the dean’s wife at gunpoint. So I think you’re better off applying for a job.

  Are There Jobs Available?

  Heck yes! Don’t you listen to those Negative Nellies who tell you there aren’t any good jobs anymore, just because the steel, automobile, shoe, clothing, railroad, and agricultural industries have all collapsed! There are new career opportunities opening up all the time in today’s fast-changing economy. Just to give you an idea, let’s look at:

  Lobster Repair: A Fast-Growing Field

  You know how, when you go into a seafood restaurant, they have the lobsters up front, in a tank, all trying to scuttle back out of the way and hide under each other so they won’t get eaten? Well, it’s inevitable that some lobsters get damaged in the process-broken claws, eye stalks falling off, that kind of thing. And then you have the problem that (a) you have damaged lobsters, which you can’t serve to your customers and (b) you have these loose random eye stalks lying around the bottom of your tank, which hardly act as a Cheerful Greeting to your incoming customers. This is why there is such a tremendous demand today for people who know how, using modern adhesives, to reassemble a damaged lobster, or use the leftover parts to construct a whole new one, often incorporating a new and improved design (“Hey,” more than one delighted restaurant patron has cried recently. “My lobster has a claw made entirely out of eye stalks!”).

  And this is just one new emerging-growth career field. Others include: Drug Overlord; Computer Geek; Televised Christian; Person Who Sells Staples to the Defense Department for What It Cost to Liberate France; Vigilante; and Pip, whose job is to stand behind Gladys Knight and go “whooo whooo” at certain points during the song, “Midnight Train to Georgia.”

  WELDER WANTED—TO weld certain pieces of metal together.

  ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT—Young-thinking, fast-moving, forward-looking emerging-growth company with dynamic, attractive plant-filled lobby featuring modernistic, incomprehensible sculpture and old, heavily thumbed issues of Pork Buyer Weekly seeks eager,ambitious,personable, aggressive, can-do, confident, hard-driving, highly motivated self-starter to clean scum-encrusted office coffee-related implements.

  Where Should You Begin Your Job Search?

  The answer to that question is right in your local newspaper. That’s right! Every day, hundreds of employers pay good money to advertise jobs in the classified ad section, apparently unaware that practically nobody reads it! So I want you to turn to the help wanted section right now and locate all the ads that look promising.

  The way to do this is to count the adjectives. For example, take the ads shown above.

  The first ad contains only one adjective, and thus represents a poor career opportunity. The second ad, on the other hand, clearly offers a very exciting opportunity, based on the adjective count.

  Your Resume

  Your resume is more than just a piece of paper ... it is a piece of paper with lies written all over it. Often, a good resume can mean the difference between not getting a job and not even coming close.

  in writing your resume, you should follow the format shown in the example below, although you might want to modify it to suit your indi
vidual situation. For example, you may want to use your own name, instead of the word “NAME.” Unless you have a name like “Dewey.”

  A lot of people make a really stupid mistake: namely, they send their resume to the Personnel Department. Pay close attention here: NEVER SEND ANYTHING TO THE PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT.

  RESUME

  NAME: (Last name first, first name in the middle, middle name way off to the right, in a little box. Should sound British.) ADDRESS: (Include clear directions as to how to get there, such as, ‘if you come to a Dairy Queen on your left, you have gone too far. PHONE: (Specify whether “Princess” or “Standard” model; note any special features such as “last number re-dial.”)

  CAREER OBJECTIVE: (This should sound like the speeches given by Miss America contestants to demonstrate that they have a Personality. For example: “I would very much like to utilize my skills to the greatest of my ability in hopes of achieving a significant degree of accomplishment.” Leave out the part about hoping, someday to work with handicapped animals.)4412

  SUMMARY OF CAREER ACCOMPLISHMENTS: (The important thing here is verbs. Verbs verbs verbs! You want to sound like a person with a slightly overactive thyroid. Be vague. Lie. Remember that nobody’s going to read this.)

  September, 1985 to present: ADMINISTRATOR. Initiate, coordinate, Participate, and eliminate all traces of long and short-term mid-range interim approaches. 1983 to 1985: COORDINATOR. Gathered, analyzed, and collated a wide range of data, then kneaded it on a floured surface and baked it in a moderate oven until a toothpick inserted in the center came out clean. Served six. REASON FOR LEAVING: Communists. 1981 to 1983: ASSOCIATE. Put my right hand in, took my right hand out, did the hokey-pokey, and shook it all about. REASON FOR LEAVING: Ennui.

  EDUCATION

  SCHOOL: Harvard and Yale University School of Learning, Ph.D. in Business Appliance Management, 1980.

  COLLEGE: Fargo and Surrounding Farms College of Arts and Sciences Such as Long Division, B.M. in Restaurant Communications, 1978.

  REFERENCES

  I should be happy to supply the names of any number of deceased grade-school teachers upon request.

  The absolute last thing the people in Personnel want the company to do is hire you. They don’t want the company to hire anybody, because it just means more work for them. As far as Personnel is concerned, every new employee is one more cretin who will never learn how to fill out his medical and dental claim forms correctly.

  So if you send your resume to Personnel, they’ll set fire to it immediately and send you back the following letter:

  Dear (YOUR NAME):

  Thank you so very, very much for sending us your resume. What a nice surprise it was! “Look at this,” the mail person cried as we all gathered ‘round. “(YOUR NAME) has been so kind as to send us his or her resume!” What excitement there was, here in Personnel! We danced far into the night!

  Sadly, however, we do not expect to have any positions available until approximately the end of time. We will, however, keep the remains of your resume on file, in a tasteful urn, and you may rest assured that nobody will disturb it except for routine dusting.

  Sincerely,

  The Personnel Department

  So the question becomes: what do you do with your resume? My advice is, set fire to it yourself. Nobody ever reads resumes anyway. I only told you to write one because it’s an old job-seeker tradition, and we have so few traditions left.

  Good! We’ve taken care of that! Now let’s move on to the next step, which is ...

  Writing An Effective Letter That Will Get You A Job Interview

  In an ideal world, of course, your letter would say, “Dear Sir or Madam: Give me a job interview or I will kill your spouse.”

  But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world that has strict postal regulations regarding what you can say in letters. So you’re going to have to take the “soft sell” approach to getting an interview. Chances are, you’ve already written such a letter, and chances are it sounds something like this:

  Dear Sirs or Madams:

  As a dynamic, eager, hardworking young person who brings an enormous quantity of enthusiasm to every task, on account of being so eager, I am writing, to express my sincere desire to be considered for the position of Employee within your company. I am confident that once we have had a chance at some mutual and convenient time to meet and shake hands firmly while making eye contact and reviewing all my major accomplishments dating back to the birth canal, you will realize how mutually beneficial it would be for your firm and myself to seek some means of achieving our future goals in a way that would benefit both parties. Mutually.

  I shall contact your office by telephone every seven or eight minutes, starting this morning, to determine a time that would be mutual and dynamic for you.

  Very sincerely,

  Byron B. Buffington II

  The advantage of this kind of letter is that it has a confident, positive, assertive, enthusiastic tone. The disadvantage is that it makes you sound like the biggest jerk ever to roam the planet. I mean, look at it from the perspective of the people at the company: they have to actually work with the people they hire, and nobody is going to want to work with a little rah-rah snot-face.

  What you want is a job application letter that makes you sound like a regular person, somebody who would be fun to work with:

  Hey—So the priest says to the rabbi, he says, “But how do you get the snake to wear lipstick?” Ha ha! Get it? Say, did you get a load of the new clerk in Accounts Receivable? Whoooo! She is so ugly, it takes two men and a strong dog just to look at her! Ha ha! How about those Giants? I don’t know about you, but I say we knock off early today.

  Take it easy,

  Byron “The Buffer” Buffington

  Whom You Should Send Your Letter To

  A vice-president. It makes no difference which one. All vice-presidents do exactly the same thing with their mail, namely write the first name of a middle-management subordinate in the upper right-hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: “Dan?” They do this by reflex action to everything placed in front of them, usually without reading it, then they toss it into the “OLD” basket. If an employee is hospitalized and a get-well card is passed around the company, it usually winds up with an unintelligible blot in the upper right-hand corner where all the vice-presidents wrote the names of subordinates followed by question marks.

  Nobody will ever dare throw your letter away, once a vice-president has written on it. Eventually somebody is going to ask you to come in for an interview, if only to find out how the snake joke starts.

  How To Prepare For Your Job Interview

  One obvious way to remain calm and perspiration free during an interview, of course, is narcotics, but there you run into the problem of scratching yourself and trying to steal things off the interviewer’s desk. So as a precaution, what most veteran employment counselors recommend is that you wear “dress shields,” which, as some of you women already know, are these highly absorbent devices that you stuff into your armpits. They are available in bulk at any good employment agency. For a job interview, you should stuff three or four shields into each pit. This will cause your arms to stick out from your body at an odd angle, so to prevent your interviewer from attaching any significance to this, you want to begin the interview with a casual remark, as is illustrated by the following “model” interview dialog:

  INTERVIEWER: Hello, Bob. Nice to meet you.

  YOU: There’s nothing odd about my arms!

  The Interview Process

  Basically, what the interviewer wants to know is how well you can “think on your feet.” So what he’ll try to do, with his questions, is throw you some “curve balls,” which means you should come to the interview well supplied with snappy retorts. Let’s go back to our “model” interview:

  INTERVIEWER: Tell me, Bob, why are you interested in coming to work for us?

  YOU: Who wants to know?

  INTE
RVIEWER: Ha ha! Got me there! Bob, what specific strengths do you feel you would bring to this job?

  YOU: So’s your old man!

  INTERVIEWER (tears of laughter streaming down his face): Bob, you sound like the kind of quick-thinking employee we are looking for! How about a large starting salary?

  YOU: You and what army?

  CONGRATULATIONS You’ve got the job!

  In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to figure out what exactly the nature of this job is—specifically, whether it involves any duties, and if so, how you can get out of them.

  Chapter Three. How To Do Your Job, Whatever It Is

  To really succeed in a business or organization, it is sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it involves any duties. Try to find this out in your first couple of weeks by asking around among your co-workers. “Hi,” you should say. “I’m Byron Buffington, a new employee! What’s the name of my job?” If they answer Long-Range Planner or Lieutenant Governor, you are pretty much free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement. Most other jobs, however, will involve some work.