A Room With a View
It had been ages since I’d ridden a good old corporate elevator. ”No elevator music?” I thought. I shuffled into place with my fellow passengers as we spontaneously organized ourselves along an invisible grid like toy soldiers on a factory conveyor belt. In the office lobby, a receptionist with a thick Slavic accent offered me water. Before I could decide, Kevin emerged purposefully from behind a glass wall, dressed as if to disappear in a world of business casual . ”Thanks for coming in on such short notice,” he said. ”We’ve had over 200 responses since last night.”
Melissa, the woman being interviewed simultaneously with me, smiled with her mouth closed. We don’t mind coming in on short notice, her smile said. We have no jobs to go to.
We were sitting in the conference room of BRC Advisors, on the fourteenth floor of a piece of the LA skyline. To the southwest, we looked down on the Staples Center and the Harbor Freeway. It was the sort of view that made you think prematurely about getting distracted in your cubicle. I imagined this conference room multiplied by hundreds of thousands across the corporate landscape of our country: cheap, plush carpet, ergonomic swivel chairs in faux black leather, a wood laminate table in which you could see your own reflection.
The opening was for a loan modification assistant. The company we’d be working for was not BRC but NMS, a national “attorney-based firm that provides the software to streamline and standardize the back-end processing of loan adjustments,” in Kevin’s words. ”We work primarily in New York and Hawaii. Now, most firms don’t have access to an actual attorney, but since we are attorney-based…” Kevin went on introducing NMS while giving a distracted once-over to Melissa’s resume through a pair of round lenses.
I wasn’t sure what an attorney-based firm was, or how one streamlined back-end processing for anything, but Melissa nodded at the appropriate moments, so I followed her lead. Basically, it seemed, our job would entail taking phone calls from people whose homes are over-valued. We’d fill out forms with their responses to a pre-established set of questions, and, if we could help (read “profit from”) them, we’d refer them to the attorneys the firm is based on and complete the loan modification.
“Veritas, loan management…” Kevin murmured as he read aloud from Melissa’s resume. There was another manager, Donovan, who wore a tidy set of dreadlocks and a sweater vest, and was decidedly less vocal as he scrutinized mine.
So,” Kevin said decisively as he looked up, “are you employed now?”
“I’m in between,” Melissa said.
“I just moved out here,” I echoed.
“Let’s start by, well…” Kevin said, looking to Melissa—“what are your strengths?”
She got off to a false start with “I’d say, persistence and things,” before reconsidering and beginning anew with: “What I liked when I was at Veritas…” I had dodged a bullet. This is one of the more painful questions in the interview playbook; how lucky it was not to go first.
When she finished, Kevin and Donovan slid our resumes across the table and switched. Kevin resumed muttering: “I haven’t uh looked at yours yet. OK, let’s see…” He made a series of breathy sounds like the first consonant cluster in tchotchke as he scanned the page before him.
“Columbia…DJ, so, why are you here?”
My fib, in this case, was well-rehearsed, as I’d put it down in an emailed cover letter which they obviously hadn’t read: “I’m planning to apply to law school a year from now. I’m not sure that real estate law is what most interests me, but it would be great to get exposure to everything I can.”
“OK. That makes sense. What kind of law are you interested in?”
“Uh..public interest.” I riffed for a while on forests, plywood, mines and white paint, then realized I was rambling and trailed off with a sentence fragment about international law.
Melissa had to answer this one too: “I’m in the middle of a legal battle with my nieces—I’m trying to adopt them; so, yeah, any legal experience I can get is great.”
“Well, I think, is that it Donovan?”
“I think so.”
Apologizing for cutting the interview short, Kevin said we’d hear something by Friday and wished Melissa luck with her nieces. The receptionist blandly thanked us for coming in. On our way out, clutching a styrofoam cup of water, Melissa provided a brief respite from the rehearsed monotony of the elevator by getting stuck in the doors.
