I had a sudden shiver-inducing interview memory today. I’d driven way out on the west side of town to meet with a massage therapist and author. No, I wasn’t going to massage anyone! It was an admin job; I’d be managing her schedule, book sales, correspondence, and taking and making calls. I was wary because I’d be working in her home. I like working with people, but I don’t want to know everything about them or smell the food they cook, especially if it’s meat, since I’m a vegetarian. That was enough of a reason to pass on the interview, but I was receiving unemployment benefits and had to log my job search. Getting an interview was good because it added up to three entries on my weekly forms. First entry: sending a resume; second entry: receiving a favorable response; third entry: interview.
A thirty-ish woman answered the door and introduced me to her mother, the author and master massage therapist. They weren’t dressed to match, but they both wore flowy tops, and spoke over each other in loud voices as soon as I walked in the door. They handed me a page-long list of job duties and showed me the stacks of boxes of books that crowded the entire workspace.
“Here’s the scale. We send everything UPS two-day. You need to be here by eight. We make and take calls from all over the country, so it’s already ten or eleven on the East Coast, depending on if it’s daylight savings time or not. I write instruction manuals for massage therapists. You need to make at least ten sales calls a day.” The information came fast and kept up for thirty minutes.
“Do you have any questions?”
“Yes, I do. How much time would I get for lunch?” The two women looked at each other stumped.
“Well, the last woman worked straight through lunch.”
“I would need to take a break for lunch.”
“That might be an issue.” I didn’t say anything, but it’s illegal not to give employees breaks.
The mother motioned to the desk. “Sit down.” I scrunched into a too low rolling chair in front of a huge computer monitor. The daughter squeezed her chair in next to me and reached over me to open a very dense Excel spreadsheet with text and numbers written in an 8-pt font. The mother hovered over my shoulder as the daughter moved the mouse while she talked and copied and pasted things between several different forms and windows. I couldn’t keep up with what she was showing me, but I could see there was something weird going on with the mouse cursor. “Why don’t you try? Here’s an order. Enter it into the spreadsheet.”
I took the mouse from her and moved the . . . What the hell is that?! Oh, shit, the mouse is a MOUSE! What I mean is that the moving cursor wasn’t an arrow, it was an outline of a mouse—the animal. The point of its little whiskered nose was the same as the pointy end of an arrow, only the mouse nose pointed straight to the left, not at a diagonal, like most arrows do. I had a terrible time figuring out what the nose was pointing at and fumbled through the task.
“That’s enough. Are you sure you’ve worked on spreadsheets before? You’re not very fast.” I could see a mix of disgust and impatience in the older woman’s eyes.
“Yes, I have many years of experience with spreadsheets. I kept getting hung up because I’ve never used a mouse pointer like that before.”
The daughter wrenched her head around. “What do you mean? You’ve never used a mouse??!!”
“No, I know how to use a mouse. I mean the little mouse. The one on the screen. Most computers have an arrow as a pointer, not a little mouse.”
“I’ve never seen such a thing. This is all we’ve ever used.” They looked at each other, then at me. They didn’t believe me.
I didn’t get a call back, but I still wonder . . . who the hell was the woman who held the job before? Who would hold it next? Are they themselves trapped there like mice? Did they survive to watch in wonder as an arrowhead floated across a screen? If they did, how did they FEEL? And who was the mother fucker that chose that idiotic cursor in the first place?