In the center of the communal ‘bull pen’, we huddled around the 2-page resume, gawking at the delightful EXPERIENCE and fantasizing about the lemony sunshiney relief of it all. The nights we wouldn’t be on call, the phone calls we wouldn’t have to take; the sledgehammer to our face at Friday, 4:45p.m. that could now be diverted into someone else’s queue. The bright white of the paper made us wiggle up our nose and squint hard as we shuffled the pages back and forth and back and forth madly. It was all in there.
The flying colors of the phone interview sealed him our deal. The only ‘catch’ that the agency made, was that we could not get a good look at him. We couldn’t peer into his eyes to get a warm fuzzy, we couldn’t shake his hand and verify him a real man, we couldn’t comfort ourselves to say he had a kind and honest face and he drinks his coffee just like we do. We decided we couldn’t care less; he was a contractor. Company men like to think that contractors roll out of tissue boxes, and we are ollieollie oxen freed.
When he arrived one week later, no one was prepared for him anyway. I watched the faces of those that met him for the first time, and they jumped a little bit. Some people rushed quickly and said that it had gotten hot allofa sudden and that they had to put out ‘some fire’, and they put their eyeball real close to their wristwatch as they pushed away. Some people told me that they had bad feelings about him, and I wondered why the rough whiskey voice hadn’t come over the phone, why the screaming didn’t come out over the phone, why the pure and simple truth that he is a dwarf, didn’t come out over the phone.
I, on the other hand, was elated.
But he’s mean. And he suffers from bad gas problems…always belching and chortling snorting and farting. We try to discourage it, to roll and laugh, and belch back over the cube, but it only excites him all the more.
It’s the experience of a lifetime…