At the garden store yesterday, while concentrating deeply on which kind of bush bean seeds to buy, I heard my name. When I looked up, I saw a familiar woman but couldn’t place her. We haven’t been meeting regularly in garden stores then, clearly.
“I thought that was you, but wasn’t sure!” she said, warmly. I covered well, knowing it would come to me eventually. (I’m getting old, you see, so this sort of thing doesn’t surprise me anymore. It’s not just that my brain is slower — though there is that — but because I’ve been this way for a long time, and have Grown Accustomed.)
“Well, Hi! How are you?“ I said. I knew I’d get it in a few more seconds. Church? Nope. Wow, a real puzzler.
We exchanged a couple more pleasant words before it came: she was the head of the search committee that had most recently rejected me, duh. This is the one where I crashed the computer during a timed writing test at the first interview, but was called back for a second one, anyway. This is the one where the head of the division said she’d be calling me back first thing Monday morning after my second interview, which seemed pretty unambiguous as that would have allowed no time for negotiating with any other candidate.
And this was also the one I’d decided would be my last shot, ever, at the Institution Which Shall Not Be Named. Because any more of these stupid things were going to kill me.
This was the woman who had to step in, after her boss’s gaffe, and tell me they’d hired someone else. “I want you to know,” she said, leaning towards me and holding her hand in front of her, with her thumb and finger nearly pinched together in the sign for “very small.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this. She looked very earnest, all of a sudden. “it was just… it was really, really close.”
Okay. What do you do with that? This wasn’t exactly news: the two interviews, the boss’s comment, and the two silent weeks that then followed had already kind of clued me in. The more salient point here, at least from my point of view, is that I didn’t get the job. Again.
Maybe she was hinting that I’d been her own personal favorite? Maybe she’s suffering debilitating guilt because she’d had to do the axe work this time around? (I just saw The Good Shepherd the other night, with its deeply disturbing depiction of the CIA, and spent much of the movie having a sense of déjà vu.) But in the end, it comes down to this. The woman didn’t have to speak to me. Literally: I never would have noticed her for beans if she hadn’t.
I remembered my final email to her, too, in response to her own, when I said they were better off without me anyway in a job dealing with “upper-level people,” because although I’m now entitled to wear a tiara when accompanying my high-level (he’s 6’5”!) administrator husband at the same institution, I’d be more likely to wear my pirate hat instead. Because I’m just that kind of person.
Which points out two things, I guess: one is the longer story I’ve definitely not blogged about and don’t know if I ever will. The other is that this woman had a much better sense of humor (or, at least, forbearance) than I’d ever suspected.
And besides: she was buying mulch, which just says a lot of redeeming things about a person right there, doesn’t it?
