The Cheese Factor

That isn't to say it is openly hostile. No, she's not diving across the wide expanse of table and pinning my hand to the veneer with a letter opener so I am immobilized while she draws a mustache to match her own on my face.

There are some preposterous questions designed to tell if my resume is a work of fiction or an accurate reflection of the things I'm proud of having accomplished.

There are several references to my address.

As in "Oh, I know where that is. I have a friend who lives there."

Which I translate to "I have an old, frail aunt who is a miserable shut-in who lives there and I am forced to take my turn visiting her and shopping for her Ensure and her Adult Diapers because I am a spinster with no other discernible reason not to, as I am 100% available everyday of the week including weekends."

And "So this would be an ideal commute for you. Like 15 minutes!" 

Yes, I could spit and hit the office window we are sitting by, but this strikes me as odd. Most execs would commute well over an hour for the right position, because the right challenge and an ability to do something meaningful in an organization is a whole lot more attractive than going from the bed to the office in 45 minutes flat. So yes, the short commute is appealing, in a way that pretty candles on a cake are. It is the cake that matters. The fact that a long day is not made longer by an excruciating commute is just a bonus.It's not like I am interviewing for the Grocery Cart Collector position at the super market.

But there are small indicators that tell me I should have worn my glasses.

And what I mean by that references something my friend Toni told me a long time ago when I invited her to interview with some folks in the hopes she'd join me in the firm I'd just joined.  Toni is strikingly attractive. Gorgeous hair and skin. Stylish. Killer smile. Blond hair, long lashes, ice blue eyes.

And she walked in in a beige suit and wearing her glasses.

Perhaps I gasped at the time, I don't know, but Toni explained to me that she tones down all the fabulousness on an interview. She realized then, during a period when she had been searching for a job, that some women are very threatened when the potential "new girl" also has the potential to unseat them as "the Pretty One."  Toni would rather land the job looking like a rare book collector and show up on Day One looking like Catherine Zeta-Jones.

I had questioned her then. What if you get to the interview and you are surrounded by homely men with brown suits and knit ties and pocked faces whose wives are frigid and who haven't seen a decent leg protruding from a skirt since the Apollo 13 flight?

She'd rolled her eyes. "I am not saying I make myself ugly. I am just saying I don't look like I know I'm pretty. A man will see past the glasses. Hell, a man will see past the suit and be imagining my bra the minute I smile at him instead of wince."

She had a point. I should have listened. The Big Cheese has already imagined me sashaying about the office in heels and a size zero skirt and wants to give me a swirly in the ladies restroom.