Wednesday, June 4, 2008

The Impossible Dream

This morning I went for a job interview, and I was asked a question I struggled with a little bit. The interviewer asked me to describe my dream job, and I'm afraid I wasn't 100% honest.

I think the correct answer was to describe a position almost exactly like the one for which I was interviewing. Unfortunately, the folks interviewing me hadn't yet told me the specifics of the position, so I wasn't sure what to say.

The honest answer to "What would be your dream job?" is, of course, "Driving to the bank to deposit my multi-million dollar lottery check."

Somehow, I didn't think that's the answer she wanted. I also thought it might imply that I had a poor work ethic.

The trickier question, at least for me, is why so many of the places I've worked went out of business. The first newspaper on my resume went under (publisher owed money to the IRS). I quit the second to move from New Jersey to Maryland. The third, which was my first in Maryland, went out of business six weeks after I moved here and started working. (Too bad about that one-year apartment lease, eh?) The fourth was killed by the publisher.

The first ad agency where I worked was obviously going under, so I quit to avoid the rush. (I left in March; it closed its doors in June.) The third ad agency where I worked is now also out of business.

It got to the point where I was once offered a job and I told the boss that I wanted to interview the comptroller, if only to assure myself that the place was solvent. (No doubt surprised by my request, he said okay.)

I'm also pretty good at putting restaurants out of business, too. I guess I'm the business equivalent of Typhoid Mary.

Maybe that's my dream job.

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