Every dogsbody has its day
On arts job phone calls and close calls
Receptionists at the agency Stranger would answer the phone, “Hello stranger.” Not with the singsong intonation of announcing a company name, highest pitch on the third syllable: Hello, Stranger. (C C G E.) Instead the pitch descended C B A then up to D, inflection and emphasis on the last syllable—the way you’d greet a friend you’d not seen for a while: Ello stranger! Since I’d never spoken to this woman before, I flubbed my reply, thinking I’d called a friend by mistake and not the design agency who’d just emailed me about a job.
The receptionist explained at a practiced clip how they’d all been ordered to answer the phone that way. Their boss thought the familiar/flirty greeting could be their little front-desk gimmick, that it’d make phoning their agency memorable. They weren’t wrong. Apparently it confused couriers no end. The receptionist’s tone became breathy again but only so she could apologise on the sly. This organised confusion should’ve been my first warning.
With it laboriously cleared up, I told her about the email I’d gotten about them seeing my CV on some database and offering me ‘a unique position’. Only once she’d put me through to her colleague handling the recruitment did I learn what the position was. The recruitment manager asked in a jauntier tone, “Do you know whose company this is?” I did not. She wondered, as if to herself, why I’d not looked it up, and before I could answer she named a Big Name Cultural Luminary. (More on them here.) The position was to be the Big Name’s assistant. “So can you get here this afternoon for a prelim?”
I was already heading to my current job, but I reassured myself I’d figure out some fib to leave the office early, and agreed to come. That afternoon, I arrived for my preliminary chat to be greeted by a receptionist with a different voice but the same, still unnerving, “Hello stranger!” She then had to treat me like the actual stranger I was: asking my name and who I was here to see. In a side-room I waited for the recruitment manager.
The power-suited (relevant) woman entered looking strange herself—stranger than I’d ever seen someone enter a meeting. It was like she’d just seen her kid on TV when he should’ve been at school. She neither said my name nor shook my hand but got out the words, “Would you go to an interview dressed like that?”
I looked down at my boots, chinos, my not totally offensive polo shirt. These weren’t slacker clothes, they were my work clothes! Maybe too on some level I hadn’t wanted to be so blatant as arriving earlier at my current job scrubbed up suspiciously well in a suit and tie then claim I was off for a long lunch or had a non-specific appointment. Besides, I’d thought this was just going to be a chat. “No,” said the recruitment manager, “I meant for you to go see Name today.” In her hand was my CV, which must’ve apologised for my state. “According to this, you don’t live far… Right, go home, get dressed-” I was dressed “-then head to hers for the interview.” When we parted she added another staring, smiling head-shake at my almost impressive cheek.
Leaving reception - no “Bye stranger”? - I thought of texting the manager straight off to turn down the interview, saying something like I hope she found someone better suited for the role, something petty and spirit-of-the-staircase like that. On the street I cooled off despite the sun. The rungs of life are made of indignity—the point is to climb them, not flinch from even the first with stung pride. So the story goes anyway. I took the bus home, suited up, then took the Tube to the home of the Name.
I don’t think at that age of 21 I’d even heard of this part of London, let alone been there. The size of the houses wasn’t strange so much as how they were joined. To me, terraced houses or a terrace street meant something like a tenement row. The rich would have detached mansions, wouldn’t they? But here I was looking for an address among terraced mansions, each the width of a detached house.
Arrayed so similar as they were, the Name’s house didn’t stick out. Its number didn’t appear to be on this street. I had minutes left before my allotted time. This was the days before your phone had a map, when it barely had WAP (a sort of joke way to access your emails, like looking at porn on teletext). I had to ring the agency to warn them to warn the Name I was going to be late.
“Hello stranger!”
“Sorry what, who is… goddammit!”
This time the receptionist had a hint of her own exasperation beneath the mandated breeziness. “Hello Stranger, how can I help?” I babbled my reason for calling. She didn’t fob me off to the mercies of the manager; she helped walk me to the address.
I was still thanking her as I shouldered my way through a door which seemed to be trying hard to shove me back out, my voice lurching around the stairwell like it was on a ship during a storm. With the door’s bang reverberating on the checkered tiles, I sorted out my skew-whiff satchel and damp hair.
At the next door, upstairs, I readied my face to meet a celeb, trying to give it the right mix, in fact the right paradoxical combo of looking impressed and at the same time star-unstruck.
Answering the door was a freckled, peach-red-haired woman in her late 20s, whom I’d never seen before. In an Australian accent, she introduced herself as the Name’s current assistant. She was interviewing candidates to be her replacement.
“Like Willy Wonka,” I said.
The assistant frowned, then she led me inside. With her back turned I mouthed my remark while scowling at myself. She was telling me with a strange faint tone that the Name was at an event and so wouldn’t be joining us.
The Name’s place looked as good as it ought to. (It must be exhausting for the stars of architecture and design to have homes others see, like a professional comedian having to tell everyone they meet a good joke.) The living room was so large the ceiling felt like it was lifting off as we entered. You could’ve chopped the room both ways to make four studio apartments. From the very open plan kitchen the assistant offered me a drink, waving for me to sit.
I may have been a little green about interviews (passing the interview for jobs I’d had before just meant showing up on your first day) but not enough that I’d never heard of their mind-games. The interviewer sits in a grand imposing chair while the candidate gets offered a dinky stool. As I was backing onto it, the assistant returned with our water glasses.
“That’s more a display table.”
I bobbed in place like someone finally noticing they were sitting in a spill. Collecting my satchel, I noticed now the tasteful knickknacks on the table’s middle shelves, as well as a tissue box on the floor I must’ve knocked off with my butt. (I didn’t pick it up; I’d wish I had.) I took the leather sofa by the armchair where the assistant had sat. She got out her questions and I flinched. A ghostly finger had traced a line down my temple: the first drop of sweat.
Since that day, I’ve come to find interviews a relative breeze. One day it clicked, that I was just having a chat with people like me, that the interview was a kind of 20-minute play, an improv scene, the cue being ‘You pretend this is something worth wanting, and you pretend to want it.’ (Some interviews got too breezy. Asked by a charity which provided arts for deprived kids where I saw it in ten years time, I said, “Not existing. Hopefully.” The panel’s faces dropped. I did not get the job. I guess they themselves wanted deprived kids to always be a thing?)
But at this, my second or third ‘proper’ interview, under those ceilings, having arrived late and for that Big Name, at the tail-end of a round-trip home and back on summer London public transport, I was in a sweat. My glass of water nearly shunked out of my hand like an iron rod through a greased slot. My shirt against the sofa felt like I was sitting back on used gym equipment.
The assistant began her questions, already in a halting voice. I was sweating ominously, guilt-admittingly. Which was sort of the case: I was sweating over how much I was sweating. The amount of it, it’s like it wasn’t any useful way to cool down but a crazed attempt to mop up water with more water. I’d read somewhere the interview advice to pause after you’re asked each question, take your time answering. Her pauses, and before each question, got longer. While I answered, I kept mopping my brow with the one tissue I had. It disintegrated into bobbles, which were left tacked on my skin as if this morning I’d tried to shave my forehead with a blunt razor. Tissue annihilated, I resorted to wiping my brow with my hand but it met there such a slick that it skidded off and I head-butted my bicep. The assistant’s voice became even more distant, more off-put.
Not looking me in my eyes, which dripped like cave mouths, she told me about the duties the successful candidate was expected to provide the Name. “You’ll have to be on the phone to her any given time, including Sunday nights.” (Strange that she considered the far end of the weekend the presumptuous part too far.) “There’s always events or parties to go to. Work at, I mean. Do you like kids? No, not childcare in the job description sense. What’s your tolerance for nicknames?” She shook her head as though at a ropey disguise. “Your name. She’s gonna have to abbreviate it.”
I’d never heard an Australian sound so sad. I have a memory though of her rising tone as well, her growing miff. “Can you give an example of what you did when your boss gave you two contradictory orders in less than a minute? How comfortable are you with pouring drinks for people who - forget thanks - hold their glass out to the side instead of letting you stand in front of them for a second?”
Her next pause lasted long enough I could hear a clock. “I liked the outdoors,” she said at the floor, then smiled, sniffed, shook her head, and the smile sank away into her vacant face. “Always something,” she added mysteriously. “Do you have any questions?” she asked, the standard interviewer closer. I asked the standard ones back.
“No. Do you have any questions?”
She looked at me with the subtly strained eyes of a secret hostage to the casual cop at the door. The look wasn’t directed at the sweaty mess I was. She’d not even seen the sweat, she was seeing herself from six, seven years ago. I suppose I’d paid too much mind to the adage of ‘It’s who you know’ when it came to a job in the arts, and knowing I was too young to know any whos yet I’d thought this job might be a way of meeting some. I wonder if the assistant had once felt the same.
See, she didn’t want me to ask about start-dates or decision times or prospects for career growth. She wanted something simpler, more central. What was the main premise of our meeting which I could question?
“Do I really want this job?” I asked.
A little lift at the corners of her lips and eyes. On our trek to the door, she seemed to pack more talk in than she had in our 20-minute interview: her plans for when she got back to Darwin, asking me my plans for the future, as though assuming she’d spared me. I wonder who got the job in the end. I wonder whether warning candidates off it extended her own drudgery. I wonder that she did this for a stranger.