Friday, September 23, 2016

Shooting the Breeze


I picked Clare up from the train around 8 PM Wednesday; she was working late at her temp job.  My daughter has been taking it on the chin in the job market.  People tell her they love her, compliment her interviewing skills and then go on and hire someone else, which keeps her temping.  Clare has come out of three interviews all but convinced she had the job based on people’s response to her.

How times have changed.  It used to be the interviewer was at best detached and at worst like a cop giving you the third degree:  You wanna a job here?  What was wrong with dat job you had diggin’ graves?  You scared or somethin’?  I can still remember an interview I had for a job a downtown bank a few months after I dropped out of law school.  The interviewer took great pleasure detailing the reasons why I wasn’t qualified for a career in finance.  Another time, a person wrote back because, as he said, he had nothing better to do that day than rip apart my resume.  But at least nobody was leading me on.

Naturally, we drove home while discussing the plight of the White Sox.  Chris Sale was getting shelled in Philadelphia, which is pretty much the epitaph for him getting the Cy Young Award this season.  I said how much this showed the team had given up under Robin Ventura.  Clare answered, “Yeah, but who would you hire?  I mean, Robin didn’t even want it at first.  They had to go to his house twice, I think, and convince him.”  You want things badly enough, sometimes that’s how you get them.  Clare thinks Jim Thome might be a possibility as the next Sox manager.  “At least he’s already in the organization” working for the front office.

This is how sports is supposed to work for people, not a matter of life and death like in the NFL commercials, but as a backdrop to their lives, a release from the struggles and disappointments of the day.  It’s just that right now those struggles would be relieved a whole lot more if we were Cub fans, which we’re not.  Sox fans soldier on.

There’s another epitaph for you.

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