Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Read online

  Last month we decided to start keeping a file of the most horrific job applications handed in so that we’d have something to laugh at when the work got to us. We now officially have twice as many applications in the “Never-hire-these-people-unless-we-find-out-that-we’re-all-getting-fired-next-week” file than we have in the “These-people-are-qualified-for-a-job” file. What’s the word for when something that started out being funny ends up depressing the hell out of you? Insert that word here.

  Today a woman came in to reapply for a job. She wrote that she’d quit last month but now wanted her job back. On “reason for leaving” she wrote: “That job sucked. Plus, my supervisor was a douche-nugget.” She was reapplying for the exact same job. I rehired her and reassigned her to her old supervisor, because I totally agreed with her. That guy was totally a douche-nugget.

  In the last two months, six separate men filled in the “sex” blank on their job application with some variation of “Depends on who’s offering.” Two answered, “Yes, please,” and one wrote, “No, thank you.” I hired the last one because he seemed polite.

  This afternoon an applicant wrote that she’d been fired from her job at a gas station for sleeping on a cat. Everyone in the office read the application, but none of us could agree on what the hell she was talking about, so we brought her in for an interview. When I asked her about falling asleep on her cat she looked at me and indignantly replied, “What? I never wrote that.” Then when I showed her the application she said, “Car. My boss found out I was sleeping on a car. Duh. Why would my boss care if I slept on a cat?”

  “Um . . . why would your boss care if you slept on a car?” I asked.

  “Because I was the only person working that shift. But I totally would’ve heard if anyone had driven up. I’m a very light sleeper. It’s not like I didn’t have a plan.”

  The lesson here is that sometimes you get brought in for an interview just to settle a bet.

  Today I interviewed someone who handed me a résumé saying that he’d worked at Helping Hand-Jobs. I choked on my own spit and couldn’t stop coughing. Later I showed it to the interviewer in the next office. She told me that her brother had worked there once but had quit because all the manual labor had given him heatstroke. After I started coughing again she realized my confusion and explained that it was actually named Helping-Hand Jobs and was a handyman service. Never underestimate the power of punctuation, people.

  Today I had to talk to an employee who e-mailed a photograph of his penis to a woman in his department. I knew it was his penis because it said, “This is my penis,” in the subject line. Also, his name badge was clipped to his belt and was clearly visible. I practiced saying, “Is this your penis?” over and over in my office until I could say it without giggling, and then I called him and his supervisor in.

  “Is this your penis?” I asked, as I pushed the printout of the e-mail over to him.

  I think I was expecting him to break into a sweat or try to jump through the window out of embarrassment, because apparently I’d forgotten about the fact that this was the same man who thought it would be perfectly fine to take a picture of his penis in the office bathroom to send it to a shocked coworker. Instead he grinned cockily (no pun intended), saying, “I think the better question is, Exactly how did you get a picture of my penis?”

  “It was caught in the e-mail filter. The picture, I mean. Not your penis. If, in fact, that is your penis, I mean.” I was flustered, but tried to gain control of the situation again with a deep, calming breath. “Did you mail a picture of your penis?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Would it make it better if I said I was mailing pictures of someone else’s penis?”

  I’ve thought about that question for fifteen years and I still don’t have a good answer. Instead I said, “Not really. Giving a coworker a picture of a penis is sort of universally frowned on. It’s in the employee handbook. Sort of. It’s between the lines.”

  “Is there anything in the handbook about someone in HR handing you a penis picture and asking you whether it’s yours?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I just told him he was fired and made a note that we need to update the employee handbook with more penis-related directives.

  As of today I’ve had to ask five separate men, “Is this your penis?” after their pictures got caught in the e-mail filter. (Side note: When I read this to people who don’t work in HR, they stop me here and say, “Really? People actually mail pictures of their penises at work?” And I explain that yes, it happens at least once a quarter. If it’s an HR person I’m reading this to, they always say, “Really? You worked in HR for fifteen years and you only had to ask five men about their penises?” And I explain that no, I wrote this in my first few years in HR, and there’s another one in the very next paragraph. After that they just got so commonplace I stopped writing about them in my journal. I eventually got to where I could say, “Is this your penis?” without blushing or giggling. That’s how much practice I had at handing random men photos of their junk and asking them to identify their penis. I never once had to do it with a vagina. Probably because women are better at not getting their e-mails caught in the firewall, because they don’t use the subject line “Look at my penis.” Also, vaginas seem to have less personality than penises, so “Is this your vagina?” would probably be difficult to answer. If someone asked me to pick out my own vagina’s mug shot out of a lineup of vaginas, I’d be helpless. And probably concerned about what exactly my vagina had been doing that constituted a need for its own mug shot.

  “Are these your penises?”

  This is a question I never thought I’d have to ask, because I’ve never met anyone with more than one penis, but in this case it was two men taking pictures of their penises, together, at work. They hadn’t been caught in the filter, but had instead printed out the picture using the office printer and had accidentally forgotten to pick it up. One of the guys just nodded quietly, but the other leaned over to look clinically at the photo before he pointed to the penis on the left. “Just this one,” he said. I thanked him for the clarification, because I didn’t know what else to say. His friend looked at him, stunned, but I think it was probably a good lesson for him in picking the quality of people his penis takes pictures with. Standards are important, you guys.

  Last week I turned down an applicant who had misspelled or left blank almost all of her application. She came in again yesterday with almost the exact same application, but with a different name. I turned her down again. Today she came in again and turned in another application with another new name. I asked her whether she was the girl with the first name. She said that was her sister. I told her that I couldn’t hire her unless her name matched the name on her Social Security card, and she asked for the application she’d just given me, and changed her name back to the original one. I turned her down again and pointed out that everyone lies on their application but not usually about their names. When she left she said, “Okay. See you tomorrow.” I’m pretty sure she’s not being sarcastic.

  This morning the HR director told us we were going to start hiring transportation workers to bus people to our different locations, and asked for a committee to come up with some standard interview questions for our office to use. I asked whether we should screen them to see whether they believe that they’ll be saved during the rapture, because if they do then they’re knowingly putting the lives of the passengers at risk when the bus suddenly becomes driverless and spirals out of control. I got some weird looks, so I pointed out that we technically work at a religious organization, so it should totally be okay to ask that.

  I was not allowed to join that committee, so my guess is that they totally hired a lot of bus drivers who plan on leaving their buses driverless. I bet those drivers totally know they’re putting their passengers’ lives in jeopardy but just don’t care. Which (based on what I’ve learned on religion through TV) would probably be considered a sin. So I guess either way, our pa
ssengers will still have a driver when the rapture comes. It’s gonna be a pretty nasty surprise for those bus drivers, though.

  Every HR department I’ve ever worked in has secret codes that no one else knows about, and we use them to talk about you while you’re still in the office. Here are the codes from my last job: Tucking your hair behind your ear means, “This bitch is crazy.” Tucking your hair back behind both ears means, “Totally fucking crazy.” Absentmindedly wiping your brow means, “I’m sorry. Does it look like I have ‘dumb-ass’ written across my forehead?” Picking your nose means, “Someone needs to call security.” Scratching your crotch means, “Steal second.” It worked really well until we hired a new girl who had a lot of nervous tics, and then it just became too confusing.

  Last year they installed panic buttons under our desks so we could alert security if there was someone violent threatening us. We’re supposed to test it out once a month, but security is always very slow to show up to turn off the alarm. Yesterday our boss was out, so we decided to push all the panic buttons. After fifteen minutes with no response, we decided to lie down on the floor and put signs on our chests that said things like “I’ve been shot in the head” and “We’re all dead now. Thanks.” Mine said, “I’m still alive. I just came in, and I slipped on all the blood and now I’m unconscious and have a concussion. I really shouldn’t be allowed to sleep.” In true dedication to a role I actually was asleep when security showed up fifteen minutes later. They were not amused, and pointed out that it would be a smart move to be a little less bitchy to the only people in our building who were actually required to bring loaded guns to work. The next day we all got yelled at by our boss because “potential job applicants could have been scared off if they’d looked through the glass window of our office door and had seen you all lying on the floor.” I pointed out that finding bodies on the floor and not helping was sort of an interview that they had failed anyway, so technically we were kind of saving time. He was not amused.

  At one of my jobs we’d have drills to see how easy it was to smuggle babies out of the building. One employee (usually a new hire, so that he or she wasn’t recognizable) was given a baby and everyone else in the building had to stop the person from sneaking out. It was a public building and none of our customers could know that we were doing a supersecret smuggled-baby drill, because it might seem unprofessional, so that made it harder. It was usually a fake baby, but you never knew whether it would be a real one brought from home. Today we had a drill and I stopped someone in the hall and wouldn’t let them go for fifteen minutes until security came, because I was sure it was the fake baby. It totally wasn’t the fake baby.

  This morning we were all praying with the bishop at work (which is legal, because it’s a faith-based organization, but also weird because I still don’t understand how I got hired here, except that we need to do better background checks). There were about a hundred of us in the hallway when the bishop said—in this really loud and dramatic way—“Oh, heavenly Father: Hear our prayer!” Immediately some guy from engineering’s walkie-talkie blasts out, “COME IN, CHUCK!” and I had to walk out in the middle of the prayer because I totally snorted and was drawing attention to myself, because all I could think of was how I bet God was only half listening and then was all, “WTF? Did the bishop just call me Chuck?” This is when I realized I was probably not getting into heaven, unless God has one hell of a sense of humor, which He probably does because, hello? He’s making me work at a faith-based organization. I mean, He’s not forcing me work there, but I hear He kind of controls everything, so technically this is probably His fault. If anything, they should blame God for making me snort in the middle of the prayer. When I get fired I’ll have to remember to tell the bishop that.

  Last week my boss told me to rewrite a twenty-page proposal on engagement benchmarking. I turned it in and he wrote a note on the cover that just said, “No, no. Not this.” I had no idea what he wanted, so I just put it off, and then when he came in this morning and told me he needed the final draft in a half-hour I printed out the exact same one as before, but this time on prettier paper. This afternoon he brought the whole team together to tell everyone I was the perfect example of being able to listen to constructive criticism.

  There’s a very mean girl down the hall who’s trying to get me fired. I’m no good with confrontation, so whenever I say, “Have a wonderful day,” to her out loud, I’m really saying, “Be nice to me or I will stab you in the face with a fork,” in my head. I wish her a wonderful day at least once an hour. She’s starting to get paranoid and jumpy about it, but there’s really nothing she can do, because she can’t complain about me wishing her a wonderful day without sounding totally insane. This is why you should never mess with nonconfrontational people. Because they’re too unstable to second-guess. And because they’re totally the kind of people who could suddenly snap, and stab you in the face with a fork.

  Last month the general manager came in with his usual complaint that the employment office wasn’t pulling its weight, because his area was still chronically understaffed. We told him we were running behind and gave him the “Never-hire-these-people-unless-we-find-out-that-we’re-all-getting-fired-next-week” folder and told him to let us know which ones he wanted us to call in for interviews. He returned the file the next day and has not complained since then.

  Today at lunch my coworker (Jason) was telling me about a documentary he’d seen about this woman who had a tiny upper body, but everything from her waist down was enormous, and I was all, “My God. I bet her labia is huge,” and that’s when Jason put down his fork and said he wouldn’t eat lunch with me anymore. But then I pointed out that scientifically it makes sense that her labia would be enormous. If I were her, I’d roll it up with binder clips. Or foam curlers. And then on special occasions she lets it out of the curlers and bingo: spiral perm. Totally ready for prom.

  “Hi,” Jason said, waving his hands in front of my face sarcastically. “I’m eating tuna salad over here.”

  “But just imagine what you could do with it. If you got attacked you could throw it on someone to swat them back, or you could catch children jumping out of burning buildings. I bet it’s flat as a pancake too, since it’s being squished by her legs. You could put a lantern behind it and make shadow puppets. It’s like a gift no one can ever use. Except I would totally use my giant labia. I’d entertain the whole world with it. Because that’s the kind of person I am. Saintlike. If I had an enormous labia I would change the world with it.”

  Jason threw his tuna salad in the trash. “So the only thing holding you back is . . . how small your labia is?”

  “Well, it’s not like a handicap,” I retorted. “I mean, I get by.”

  Jason was silent.

  “I’d say it’s roomy, but compact. Like a balloon valance. Or a Honda Accord.”

  Then Jason got all weird and yelled, “You aren’t supposed to tell me your vagina is like a Honda Accord! WE WORK TOGETHER,” and I’m all, “You brought it up!” Then there was this awkward silence while I tried to look penitent and Jason tried to look stern, but technically I was just thinking about how a giant labia would be a great lap blanket on cold nights, and Jason was probably wondering what a balloon valance was. So then I was all, “It’s like a tiny curtain,” and Jason was like, “What!?” and I just said, “Oh, never mind.”

  Today an applicant who couldn’t pass the typing test blamed it on me for giving her “a trick keyboard because the keys weren’t in alphabetical order.” I tried to explain that all keyboards are laid out the same way and she called me a liar. I apologized and told her that if she wanted to bring in an alphabetized keyboard, I’d be happy to hook it up for her so she could retest, and she yelled, “I’M NOT GOING TO PAY TO REPLACE YOUR SHODDY EQUIPMENT.” So I told her to go across the street to the computer store, find an alphabetical keyboard, and have them put it on our account. An hour later the computer store called to ask that we stop sending crazy people over t
here.

  This afternoon my coworker, a sweet but sheltered girl named Collette, called me into her office. “Did you know that amputee porn is a thing? Because it is. Amputee porn.” She looked like she might be going into shock, and I considered finding a blanket to wrap her in. “This guy’s supervisor found porn in a printer, so she asked me to check his hard drive, and it’s filled with amputee porn.”

  I apparently didn’t look shocked enough, because she looked at me and slammed her tiny fist on the desk, screaming: “AMPUTEE PORN.” Clearly she needed an intervention, as she was stuck in a porn loop.

  I pulled up one of the pictures, a legless naked woman. “Okay, see? This isn’t even amputee porn. It’s just . . . bad Photoshop. You can tell because there are shadows where her legs were before they were airbrushed out. I mean, it’s still totally porn. It’s just not real amputee porn.”

  Collette looked at me with sad, dead eyes, her innocence scarred forever. “So what about this?” she asked as she enlarged a photo of a one-legged girl in a bikini. “Is this porn? Or is it not? Because I can’t even tell anymore. I mean, it must be porn, because it’s in his porn folder, but I just don’t know. It’s a girl with one leg, who’s waterskiing. Is it supposed to be empowering? Is it pornographic? I DON’T EVEN KNOW.”