Dave Barry: Claw Your Way To The Top

Very sincerely,

Byron B. Buffington II

The advantage of this kind of letter is that it has a confident, positive, assertive, enthusiastic tone. The disadvantage is that it makes you sound like the biggest jerk ever to roam the planet. I mean, look at it from the perspective of the people at the company: they have to actually work with the people they hire, and nobody is going to want to work with a little rah-rah snot-face.

What you want is a job application letter that makes you sound like a regular person, somebody who would be fun to work with:

Hey—So the priest says to the rabbi, he says, “But how do you get the snake to wear lipstick?” Ha ha! Get it? Say, did you get a load of the new clerk in Accounts Receivable? Whoooo! She is so ugly, it takes two men and a strong dog just to look at her! Ha ha! How about those Giants? I don’t know about you, but I say we knock off early today.

Take it easy,

Byron “The Buffer” Buffington

A vice-president. It makes no difference which one. All vice-presidents do exactly the same thing with their mail, namely write the first name of a middle-management subordinate in the upper right-hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: “Dan?” They do this by reflex action to everything placed in front of them, usually without reading it, then they toss it into the “OLD” basket. If an employee is hospitalized and a get-well card is passed around the company, it usually winds up with an unintelligible blot in the upper right-hand corner where all the vice-presidents wrote the names of subordinates followed by question marks.

Nobody will ever dare throw your letter away, once a vice-president has written on it. Eventually somebody is going to ask you to come in for an interview, if only to find out how the snake joke starts.

One obvious way to remain calm and perspiration free during an interview, of course, is narcotics, but there you run into the problem of scratching yourself and trying to steal things off the interviewer’s desk. So as a precaution, what most veteran employment counselors recommend is that you wear “dress shields,” which, as some of you women already know, are these highly absorbent devices that you stuff into your armpits. They are available in bulk at any good employment agency. For a job interview, you should stuff three or four shields into each pit. This will cause your arms to stick out from your body at an odd angle, so to prevent your interviewer from attaching any significance to this, you want to begin the interview with a casual remark, as is illustrated by the following “model” interview dialog:

INTERVIEWER: Hello, Bob. Nice to meet you.

YOU: There’s nothing odd about my arms!

Basically, what the interviewer wants to know is how well you can “think on your feet.” So what he’ll try to do, with his questions, is throw you some “curve balls,” which means you should come to the interview well supplied with snappy retorts. Let’s go back to our “model” interview:

INTERVIEWER: Tell me, Bob, why are you interested in coming to work for us?

YOU: Who wants to know?

INTERVIEWER: Ha ha! Got me there! Bob, what specific strengths do you feel you would bring to this job?

YOU: So’s your old man!

INTERVIEWER (tears of laughter streaming down his face): Bob, you sound like the kind of quick-thinking employee we are looking for! How about a large starting salary?

YOU: You and what army?

CONGRATULATIONS You’ve got the job!

In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to figure out what exactly the nature of this job is—specifically, whether it involves any duties, and if so, how you can get out of them.

To really succeed in a business or organization, it is sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it involves any duties. Try to find this out in your first couple of weeks by asking around among your co-workers. “Hi,” you should say. “I’m Byron Buffington, a new employee! What’s the name of my job?” If they answer Long-Range Planner or Lieutenant Governor, you are pretty much free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement. Most other jobs, however, will involve some work.

There are two major kinds of work in the modern corporation or organization:

1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings; and

2. Going to meetings.

Your ultimate career strategy will be to get to a job involving primarily number two, going to meetings, as soon as possible, because that’s where the real prestige is. But most corporations and organizations like to start everybody out with a couple of years of taking messages, so we’ll discuss this important basic business skill first.

When the phone rings, lift the receiver, punch whichever button is lit, and say: “Thank you for calling the Marketing Department (or whatever). Kindly hold the line.” Then quickly punch the hold button.

Now you should check around briefly to make sure that everybody the caller could possibly want to talk to is in a meeting. This is also a good time to go to the bathroom. When you return, punch the hold button again, and say: “I am sorry, but whomever the person is to whom you wish to speak is in a meeting at this present time and is expected to remain there until at least the next major economic recession. Did you wish to leave a message?”

Now this is very important: the instant the caller starts to respond, you must say: “Will you please hold again for a moment?” and punch the hold button with a very rapid and sure motion. Now you should head on down to the Supplies Cabinet and get some handy pre-printed phone message forms, in case the caller did wish to leave a message.

When you get back to the desk, push the button again and say, “I am sorry. Now, did you wish to leave a message?” And the caller will say something like, “Listen, I’m calling from France and I don’t want Marketing, so could you ask the operator to transfer ...”

Now at this point, if you are an experienced message-taker, your sixth sense tells you the caller is just about to complete a sentence, and we certainly don’t want that to happen! So you will have to very quickly—but politely!—ask the caller to please hold the line again for a moment, and at the same time strike the hold button the way a hungry cobra strikes a small furry mammal.

Okay, we’re almost ready to take the actual message. Punch the button again, and say (in case the caller has forgotten): “Thank you for calling the Marketing Department! How may we help you?” Now at this point, there is every likelihood that the caller will have hung up. This might seem like a major obstacle, in terms of being able to take a message, but it is not, thanks to the handy pre-printed phone message forms that you got from the Supplies Cabinet. Here is what they look like:

WHILE YOU WERE OUT IN A MEETING

Mr./Mrs./Miss/Ms./Rev./Massa/ (name)

Check one:

Telephoned.

Did not telephone.

Thought about telephoning, but then changed his or her mind.

Telephoned, but could not for the LIFE of him or her remember why.

Telephoned, then hung right up, but I am certain it was him or her.

Wants you to call and attempt to leave a message for him or her.

Wants to fire you.

Wants to reveal a sordid episode from his or her past involving a goat.

Wants to end World Hunger in our lifetime.

Wants your body.

Wants for nothing.

Wants to tell you the joke about the man who finds out he has only eight hours to live, so he goes home and makes love with his wife once, twice, three times, and finally they fall asleep, and at 3 A.M. he tries to wake her up, and she says, “Not AGAIN! Some of us have to get up in the morning!”