Worst interviews ever #1: Small cap stocks

I've definitely hated every interview I've ever been through, but three stand out in my mind as being particularly torturous experiences, from which I am scarred to this day. (Well, the first one below wasn't really scarring, but a list of two is kind of lame.)

In general, I am a profoundly anxious person who sees little pointy white stars of
panic in my peripheral vision when being interviewed. In order to keep my mind from blue-screening with fear in such situations, I talk at speeds that cannot be measured by a man-made device, and form sentences of dubious syntax. This character flaw was definitely my downfall in #3, which we will get to soon. May I begin with a Freysian disclaimer that in no way are any of these anecdotes not tainted by my bad memory and possible embellishments, but they remain about 98% truthy.

And with no further delay:

# 1: The One That Wasn't That Bad, But Still Sucked

The place: A shady small-town start up that concerned itself with questionable small-cap stock investments.

The situation: Me, looking for escape hatch from other shady small-town start-up about to go supernova.

The interview: Firstly the person who recommended the job, a current employee, says to me on the day before the interview, "I don't know if, morally, I really feel good about recommending this to you. But uh, just check it out. Um." Feeling really pleased about that late breaking news, I make my way to a small nondescript office in which casually dressed young persons are scattered willy nilly, strolling around with coffee cups. They seem to lack workstations of any kind, sort of like the way startups are portrayed on TV. After waiting well past my interview time, I am ushered into the only office with a door, belonging to a man only vaguely older than my then-young self. He looks somewhat overstuffed and self-satisfied, with a cat-like gleam in his eyes.

I'm asked some cursory questions that I now can't recall, which I am sure I stammered through answering. Without explaining the nature of my theoretical job tasks, he then launches into a series of HR no-no's, except that of course, it's doubtful that they have an HR department.

"Are you married?"

"No," I answer dutifully. I would have definitely failed the Milgram experiment. Aren't they like, supposed to not ask you stuff like that? He nods. No is the right answer.

"Any kids?"

"Uh, no," I say. He is smiling. Right again.

"Great," he says. "Great." I am shown to my non-desk, a sort of card table set up in an exposed hallway. "This is where you'd work."

Later that night, the person who recommended me to the job calls. "I can't, uh, morally recommend that you say yes. I mean, you need to say no. Just, uh, don't. That guy is... uh... I could tell you some stories. I mean, I get along with him, it's just that..."

A month later, the place went out of business.

Actually wait a minute!! Backspace backspace!! The husband just reminded me of an interview that surely knocks this dubious entry out of the top three.

Actually better #1, replacing prior #1: Clip board

The place: random technology company.

The situation: Me, on a random job hunt. Sitting in the lobby, waiting for the interview panel to call me into the conference room. I am handed a clipboard by the receptionist and asked to fill out some junk. I set the clipboard in my lap, lean over to get a pen out of my purse, and... my necklace gets caught on the clipboard.

Within seconds, the conference room door will open, and my name will be called. I will be expected to immediately stand and walk into a room full of skeptical and possibly mean-spirited technology people that it is my duty to impress. My necklace is pretty short, and hopelessly jammed in the clipboard hinge. I can't find the clasp on the necklace; it is possibly tangled in the hinge along with the majority of the chain. I am leaning over, desperately wrestling a clip board that is lashed tight to my throat, basically covering my face. Not something that would likely fail to be noticed by a discerning interview team. It is seconds until the door is about to open. I am scratching at the clipboard like a rabid badger in a leg hold trap. The receptionist is choking on her gum, trying not to laugh.

Somehow, one half picosecond before my name is called, I manage to jerk the chain free. "It was looking dicey there for a minute, huh," says some joker sitting next to me. Wheezing and desperate, I hand the clip board back to the snickering receptionist on my way to the interview room.

It is possible that, by way of greeting, I told this story to the panel. Sad.

Stay tuned for Terrible Interview #2: Hospitality Gladiators.

Rosie trashes tiny dog

It was only a matter of time.

Daytime doyenne Rosie O'Donnell, who has already deflated such celebrity hot-air balloons as The Donald and Kelly Ripa with searing, yet subtly pointed poetic attacks, has turned her literary cruise missile of honesty on one of the great internet strongholds of trivia and irrelevance: the tiny dog site.

Imagine tiny dog's surprise when she happened to stumble upon Rosie's latest bromide, which has since been pulled due to a lethal counterattack waged by the tiny dog legal team. On January 24, 2007, Rosie writes:

***

the tiny dog site
whored out to America
random content
can't fix the broken
moral compass

questions...

did u think the masses would not smell a rat?
yes
did u think yr site would escape the trth?
yes

u talk about trivia while America burns
i don't want to say
Guantanamo Bay
Iraq and WMD, global warming, think much?

u think u amuse
not so
clowns frown behind the smiles
yes

Ur web site a 404 of moral measure

In a misty cloud of pink vapor

***

Rosie, let me say this. Upon few things do I agree with Donald Trump, but on his recent words, we both agree: "Rosie will rue the words she said." Oh yes, Rosie. Revenge will be mine.

Worst web site ever

It looks like tiny dog has not updated in 10 days or so. Is there someone I can talk to? Can you escalate my call to your manager? Can I get a discount or a coupon? It will benefit you to remember that there is no shortage of meaningless content providers on the interweb, and that I am free to take my web surfing eyeballs elsewhere.

Take note, tiny dog.

Man Laws

Men, in case you haven't happened by a TV lately, Miller Lite has taken on the task of defining a code of conduct for your gender, known as the Man Laws, in the interest of selling you diet beer.

It will surprise no one that the Man Laws generally center on the proper dispensation of nachos and brew, and the relative value of bro's to ho's, but there are of course other, lesser man laws that it may behoove you to review. Thus tiny-dog presents you with the following mandatory statutes of boy-havior. Review and adhere:

• Once You Have set up a Man-Room in your House, Outfitted with Home Networking Equipment, a La-Z Boy, or Video Games, You Have Officially Reached That Point in your Life Where You Hide from Women to Take Naps, Otherwise Known as Middle Age.
• You Do Not Need That New Digital Doohickey. The Old One Works Fine.
• Ben Stiller Isn't Funny. Neither is Will Ferrell. Except that Zoolander is Kind of Funny I Guess if your Standards are Low.
• If You Are Losing Your Hair, Do Not Persist With your Former Hairstyle. It Doesn't Work Anymore.
• Plastic Surgery is Extremely Un-Manly, Which Calls Into Serious Question the Presence of Burt Reynolds on the Man Laws Bench.
• It Is No Longer Possible to Impress People With Your Cell Phone. It Doesn't Matter Which One You Have.
• If You Drink Miller Lite, You Need to Get a Better-Paying Job.

There are others, but it wouldn't do well to overwhelm manly-kind with too many behaviorial bromides, since Miller Lite.com is currently churning them out at Wiki-speed. Thus, with these laws in mind, go forward and live large like the men that you are.

Random.

Firstly I once promised to publish a link to the classic song, Best Western, by the now-defunct alt-country act known as Old Nisqually, consisting entirely of the Nup and recorded in a motel room in Ashland, Oregon. Here it is. And it rules, people.

Secondly, die Blogger, die. Try to click any of the links at right to the tiny dog archives. What, they don't work? Could it be Blogger's *&^%tty upgrade to the "new" Blogger that added no discernible feature upgrades other than breaking all of my archive links and making me log in with some random Google ID I never use? THANKS BLOGGER.

What the hell is the husband watching on TV right now? There are dudes in reindeer horns, and ladies in bathing suits, and one of the Baldwin brothers flashing, and some kind of hot tub. I know it sounds X-rated but I don't think it's even that promising. Oh, it's this. Dear lord.

And congress? Grow a pair.

What the hell is this? Now the husband is watching a basketball game, and there is this thing best described as concentric cardboard tubes running around on the court with big Ostrich feathers taped to the top... apparently this thing is a mascot of some kind. I don't understand sports. I really don't.

This post is a boondoggle.

Short Stop!

I'm sitting here eating some leftover Christmas hell candy called Reindeer Corn, possibly consisting mostly of carnuba wax, and it is really taking me back to the golden era of questionable candy consumption.

When I was a kid, there was this lame little convenience store located a few blocks away from my house, known as Short Stop. It changed names many a time over the years, but never stopped being called Short Stop around my house. On an ungodly hot summer day in the early 80's, one might have found me in my flip-flops, walking on the burning sidewalk by the Winding Way traffic, bound for the Short Stop candy aisle to buy one of the following 5 items:

LikMAid: Gross sugar powder with a sugar dip-stick. A horrifying blizzard of sucrose and food dye. Crunching on the spit-covered, petrified sugar stick after hoovering three full packets of sugar dust was the ultimate act of self-destruction. Not even kids really thought these Kool-Aid packets made for a delicious candy experience, but it was the overall delivery vehicle and sheer Everest-like challenge of the entire concept that kept me hooked. People joke about Lik M Aid. I actually ate it.

Flicks These apparently still exist, although I have not seen any evidence of them on this planet since 1979. Dusty, carob-like chocolate drops, disconcertingly oversized and cow-pattylike, were stacked like Pringles inside of foil-covered cardboard tubes. The main challenge with Flicks was how many to eat, and how many to save for later, since one could easily scrunch up the foil at the end of the tube to re-seal the container.

Giant Chewy Sweetarts The Giant Chewy Sweetart was a sort of hybrid between garden-variety hard candy of the compressed dust variety (see Smarties), and stringy, over-chewed gum, delivered in the form of a sour, oversized disc. The word disgusting comes to mind, and yet tearing one apart with your baby teeth on someone's front lawn in 100 degree heat was a strangely compelling activity in 1980.

Zots Horrifyingly foamy Alka-Seltzer-meets-Jolly Rancher lozenges, sold in linked, sausage-chainlike packaging. One didn't want to be distracted with idle chatter while savoring the fizzy, baking-soda center of a Zot, which was gone in a blink; it was the sole purpose for withstanding the otherwise entirely mediocre grandma's-candy-dish coating.

Bone candy Behold the glory that is bone candy. The concept is this: a plastic coffin containing your standard compressed-dust candy items, except that they are shaped like bones that form an entire candy skeleton. What's the catch? Sometimes they don't form the whole skeleton. Thus, you dispatch yourself directly back to Short Stop to buy more coffins. I am pretty sure I never actually formed a whole skeleton.