Flashover
We met in a windowless, bald eagle-themed conference room. At one end was a bookcase where jugs of flame retardant stood as in a display case. “You pick a city” read the dry-erase board, alluding to a pushpin-riddled map of the Lower 48 on the adjacent wall. This represented U.S. Safety Inc’s upcoming wave of expansion.
I spent a few minutes with another young man filling out their curious application: “If you made a list of your ten favorite people would you be on it?” and so forth.
As we were wrapping up, a leggy woman in a black business suit walked in talking as though she had not seen a period since she left Long Island twenty five years ago. “I’m Lisa Bernaldos. So this orientation is gonna have four parts: first you’re gonna watch this film, second I’m going to show you what we do, third I’m going to talk to you about the management positions and fourth I’m gonna take each of you in for an interview. Fair enough?”
Ms. Bernaldos walked to the bookshelf and pressed play on a TV/VCR perched above it. “I want you to pay special attention to the term ‘flashover.’ We’re gonna come back to it.”
On screen, a narrator began citing figures on fire damage in the US from 1982: the most fire deaths of any industrialized country, and more than 8,000 annual fire hours each costing an average of 1 human life, 3 serious injuries, and $2 million dollars.”
Flashover is the moment during a fire when everything in a room ignites, and “Why America Burns” (released in 1982) consisted mainly of watching ‘test rooms’ set on fire for research purposes. “This is how a typically furnished RV living room might catch on fire,” the narrator said,2 minutes and 11 seconds into one test burn.
When Ms. Bernaldos returned and pressed stop, lifted a fire extinguisher from the bookshelf. “Did you know that only five percent of Americans own a fire extinguisher? That leaves 95 % of people unprotected. Did you guys notice the term ‘flashover?’ Now imagine a company who created a product that could keep flashover from occurring, keep stuff from catching on fire at all. Do you think they’d do pretty well? We’re that company. Now let me show you what we do.”
Ms. Bernaldos took a pie tin and a can of lighter fuel from the bookshelf. Producing a strip of paper from the tin, she launched into her pitch: “The short end is just regular paper, but the long end has been treated with Dri-One flame retardant. Dri-one is non-toxic and non-corrosive,” She lit the short end, but “as soon as it gets to the Dri-One, it goes out. Now let me make it worse,” she said, dousing the long-e`nd in lighter fluid. It caught for a second, and then, sure enough, it went out.
“There are five steps to you becoming a manager.” Ms. Bernaldos moved toward the dry-erase board and delivered a monologue simultaneously in speech and in writing: “1. You do $2000 in retail sales. 2. You meet with a regional manager—that’s me—and go through our training class. 3. You meet with the PRESIDENT of our company and talk about your future. Because, do you want to be an office manager your whole life, or do you want a career? 4. You pick a city and 5.—and we don’t even consider this a step—you become an OFFICE MANAGER. Now if you guys could fill out the other side of the application, I’ll take the first to finish.”
I turned my attention to the backside:
“What was the most impressive feature of the flame retardant?”
“It can actually save lives,” I wrote.
The final piece of the application was a long list of criteria for which you were asked to rate yourself as below, at, or above average. This was not the time for modesty, so I said I was above average as a “doer,” and a self-starter, and that I responded well to guidance.
It turned out that I had done the right thing, since when I went to interview, Ms. Bernaldos drew a big X over the empty “below average” column and circled the rest. “Are you a people person? Yeah? OK.” ‘People person,’ she wrote in the margins. This is the can-do attitude of corporate America, the gauge of human worth in a job interview: Posturing over humility, pushiness over all else.
