Pick a Color
I found a spot next to a fellow named Sam who had an easy smile and a modern-day pompadour. He held a clutch of posters for his band, the Don Quixotes, on his lap. Should the front-desk opening at USA Hostels pass him by, he reasoned, he’d put up a few in the lobby anyhow. ”So are they going to take us one-by-one,” Sam wondered, “or just do some kind of a pow-wow?”
This was the third of four ‘group interviews’ for the front desk position—evidently a growing trend in this era of employer’s choice. The day before, he’d been to a walk-in interview for a minimum wage position at Barnes and Noble where 130 people had showed up. ”Most of them were career women in their thirties too.”
At the Hollywood hostel, most of the career women had stayed home. There were rumblings in some quarters of being underdressed or perhaps over-pierced, but our concerns were put to rest when Kat strutted out sporting a broad smile and a horse-shoe shaped nose ring. Cradling a clipboard, multiply tattooed arms showed where sleeves might have been. Her colleague Ollie appeared seconds later—a balding man who stood a foot taller and whose identical buzz cut somehow made a more conservative impression than Kat’s.
At their behest, we shifted our chairs en masse to the other side of the courtyard and formed a pow-wow circle in the shade of a square awning. Ollie took command: “We’re going to ask you all one question, at which point we’re going to go inside and deliberate. We’ll call your name if we’d like you to stick around for the second and third questions. If not, we’ll thank you for your time and wish you luck.” We all murmured and resettled in our seats.
“It’s a five-part question: What’s your name?” Laughter…”Where do you currently live? Where have you travelled and lived before? Where would you like to go next? And, what stands out as the best or worst customer service experience you’ve ever had? Let’s start with you!” Ollie said, waving his hand to the right.
“My name is Lisa Roberts. I currently reside…” and so on. Lisa had her worst customer service experiences at her last job, working at an elderly care facility. ”I would say that my worst customer service experience is having to clean up pee and vomit for people who really aren’t polite or grateful,” she said. ”But then, that was like every day, so…”
A young woman from London recounted an experience working for Amnesty International trying to help someone find her family’s kidnappers, only to find out in their conversation that the woman’s family had been abducted by aliens.
Travel experience in the room ranged from other parts of California to Mexico,Europe, Argentina, and China. Australia was far and away the the most wished-after destination, perhaps because unemployment there is still under six percent.
Upon deliberating, Kat and Ollie reemerged and called the names, roughly, of those of us who had left the continent before. Two thirds of the group stood up stoically and walked off without a word. Sam looked over and pulled an upturned fist towards his chest in a gesture of mock triumph.
Question number two: what are three things you know about our company? Some people knew of other hostel locations that served free pancakes, or held weekly trivia nights, but I failed this question outright.
Ollie moved on to question number three: ”Pick any color and describe it to me as if I was blind from birth. If someone does your color first, pick another one.”
Sam took the lead: “Vast, deep, endless, permeating…” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and paused decisively between each adjective. He held his hands out as if he were cupping some invisible orb, and stared intently at a point beyond them on the ground. “…infinite, impenetrable, death, total, totality…”
“Black?” Kat guessed. Right on.
Sarah followed up tentatively a few seconds later with “serene, nature, fresh, soothing, plants, environment…”
I was feeling ambitious, so I jumped in with “tender, sweet, supple, juicy, bounce, strawberry,” and left an awkward silence that made me feel like I had broken some unspoken rule. Ollie was stumped. ”Pink,” I said.
The two remaining chose red (“angry”) and white (“peaceful”), respectively, and easily helped Ollie recover his sight.
