Apathy Sketchpad

A few weeks ago, a man (I can’t remember his name. For the sake of argument, let’s call him Bernie.) came into our Condensed Matter lecture, with a pack of questionnaires about summer work. I filled mine in and gave it back and that same evening he phoned me up. The next day myself, Adam, and Stavros were sat in a meeting with another guy we’d never met before, and Bernie started explaining that he was looking for students for a scheme of summer work run by Southwestern Company which would involve us “basically running [our] own business for three months”, and earning, on average, £4500. This sounded like quite a good thing to be involved with, but my suspicions were first aroused when he showed us a list of people and their earnings, all of which were around £25000 – £30000, and I began to wonder how many people get nothing to drag the average down to £4500. It turned out to be 30%. I got really puzzled, though, when he announced that if we did a second summer there, it would include valuable management training, which personally I’d have thought would be more useful before we set up our own business. The interesting thing is that during the course of the meeting, the work changed slowly from running our own businesses into selling books door to door, and the only reason we could ever be accused of running a business is because we would technically be independant contractors for legal reasons, the legal reasons in question being that you have to pay actual employees, whereas all we’d get is 35% or so commission.

“But the books are good, aren’t they?”

Oh, yeah, they’re good books, but we don’t want to be selling them. Particularly if it means spending the summer in some random part of the country with a ‘host family’ we’d never have met for a garaunteed income of zero. I feel the fatal flaw in Bernie’s logic was in giving a hard sell. Surely if we’re smart enough to be expected to give a hard sell to people, we’re smart enough to spot one.

At the end of the meeting he handed out applications forms. Stavros was accepted, but is going to Canada and can’t do it, which is a shame, because it would have been fun for him to have had only two jobs ever and for them both to be ones I’d refused. I was totally bored and uninterested, so I flled the form out, because that’s what I do with forms, but I filled it out like I talk, not like I fill out important forms, and Adam excelled himself and got a second round interview (held in the pub) because he’s too polite to say no.

The interview apparently went quite well, from a traditional point of view, but really rather badly from Adam’s rather unique outlook, and he got invited to a third round interview (held in the refectory). Apparently, Bernie was trying to perform ’subtle’ psychometric tests on him, such as monitoring his hand movements and eye contact. This is quite easy to believe, and would certainly explain why he got us to do all that maths in the first meeting. Adam decided to mimic Bernie’s own hand movements, and maintain eye contact at all costs, regardless of whether or not it could be described as a good idea. As far as we know, Bernie never noticed.

Then Bernie made another mistake. He called Adam’s mother to “allay any fears she might have” (or “give her a hard sell too”), and succeeded only in annoying her. As it turned out, Adam’s mother, not being the gullible type, did have a few questions to ask, all perfectly reasonable, and all of which Bernie failed entirely to answer.

Adam eventually told Bernie he didn’t actually want the job after Bernie asked him to write two essays before the third interview. (One was about why he wanted the job, and the other was about why he would be good at it.)