Parah Salin: A Tale of Affirmative Action

Imagine this:

You are a woman who’s been working in the same place for years and years. One day, a young woman comes in for an interview for a position you want, a supervisory position, one that’s above you. You've applied for the job and expect to be interviewed. The company has listed the job, however, and one young woman has sent a brief resume to the personnel department. Her resume is poorly written and its inconsistencies are glaringly obvious to the point that many of them appear to be outright lies. She’s sent a picture with it. As a joke, the personnel person passes it on to your boss.

Your boss decides he wants you to interview the young woman but that he wants to be there when you do. “Oh, I have to see this one for myself,” he says to you. “And it'll be good for you to practice your interviewing skills.” He says this like he's intimating that you are going to get the supervisor position in which case you will have to interview people. And anyway, the boss been accused of improprieties in the workplace so he can't conduct interviews with members of the opposite sex behind closed doors unless a third party is present, but he’s still in charge of who gets hired.

The woman comes in about five minutes late. Your boss is a tyrant when it comes to lateness, merciless to the point that he once wrote up a young man who was eight minutes late because his wife went into false labor one morning. Your boss looks the young woman up and down and says nothing. She doesn’t apologize for being late.

She sits down, and you introduce yourself and ask her to tell you about her experience. She says that her name is Mary after the Holy Mother of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. She says that she married her high school sweetheart, they’ve been married for almost twenty years, and they have a great, big family. She says she loves sports.

Your boss beams at her, and she beams back. He likes sports, too.

You ask about her why she wants the job. She says she’s had similar positions in the past. "Oh," you say, "Can you tell me about those jobs?"

Before she can answer, your boss says, “Now, now. I don’t think that’s necessary.” He says the job is not really that tough. She'll be able to handle it. She looks down at the table with what you take for shyness. When she lifts her head, you can see that her eyes are filled with tears. She says she’s got a baby at home--a tiny, precious gift from God--who was born with a heart murmur. She says she's just been sick with worry over it. Your boss “tsk-tsks” at her in sympathy. She wipes away a tear and says, “I’m tough, though. I’m going to make it.” Your boss says, “Of course you are, honey. Of course you are.” She smiles broadly at him. “Thank you so much!” He says, “I think we’ve got a lot in common.”

You lift her resume up to look at something more closely and see that under hobbies, she’s listed travel. The job she’s applying for requires a lot of travel. She’ll be working directly with all your customers who live outside the US. You ask, “I see that one of your hobbies is travel.” She tears her gaze away from the boss and looks at you and says coldly, “Yes.”

“Oh, so where have you been?” You try to sound friendly.

“A few places. You probably don’t know them.”

The boss smiles at her.

You’ve traveled extensively, and you’re losing your patience. “Try me,” you say evenly.

She looks beseechingly at the boss. “Wellll....” she says, “ I did go to Niagara Falls on my honeymoon.”

That was twenty years ago.

“Oh? That must have been nice,” you say. “Have you ever been out of the country?”

She looks from the boss to you again. She says flatly, “Yes.”

“So....”

“I went to Mexico for my anniversary,” she says.

You’ve been to Mexico. In fact, you were an exchange student in Mexico. You speak fluent Spanish. You say, “Oh, great! Some of our customers are in Mexico. Do you speak any Spanish?”

She looks at the boss and rolls her eyes. “Dame un cerveza,” she says. Your boss is impressed. “What does that mean?” he asks.

“Give me a beer,” she says. She and the boss laugh together.

“That’s funny,” he says.

“Well, it’s the only Spanish you really need in Mexico!” she says. “They pretty much have to speak English anyways.”

“You’re right,” the boss says. He is still laughing at her joke.

The interview goes downhill from there. She refuses to answer any of your questions and when she does answer, she gets the answers to even the simplest questions wrong. She says that in her opinion, she could do the job without traveling. She says that’s why God invented telephones. She knows what it’s like, she says, to be a supervisor because she has a big family. They do exactly what she tells them to do, she says, “or else!” The boss chuckles at that.

You also have a young daughter. You ask her if any of her kids are school-aged. “I think that’s an illegal question for you to ask,” she says to you coldly.

“Yes,” the boss says. “We can’t ask questions about family.”

Do you have any questions for us?” you ask.

She smiles at the boss. “Yeah. When can I start?”

“Well, the sooner the better,” he says. “We could use some new tail around here.” He looks at you when he says this and he is not joking.