This should all be in order."" I smiled brightly at a hostile-looking woman in her mid-20s as I passed her the jar. Her disapproving silence confirmed my suspicion that even in a health clinic, handing over a half-pint of one's own urine is not considered an invitation to friendly conversation.
I decided then that a handshake was probably out of the question.
It wasn't my fault we had to go through this transaction. An hour earlier I had been stating my earnest desire to spend my summer nights laboring in a McDonald's warehouse in a drab industrial park, a claim which prompted my interviewer's narrow-eyed follow-up question, ""Would you be willing to take a drug test?""
You bet I would. The fact that I didn't use drugs didn't make a mandatory test any less inconvenient or annoying, but I responded as though I was never more delighted or flattered then when I had to drive an hour out of my way to prove I wasn't a criminal or an addict.
My feigned enthusiasm at the prospect of undergoing the scrutiny of Ronald McDonald, Creepy Clown M.D., was merely one side of a dilemma I frequently experienced during job interviews.
Clueless as to when and how to lie in a professional situation, my typically comatose body language failed to conceal my attitude toward the business end of hot food lines and credit card scanners.
Now, sitting in a tiny office ripe with the odor of Chicken McNuggets, my first attempt at a professional demeanor had sent me over into the manic glee usually exhibited by game show contestants.
It wasn't that I possessed too much personal integrity to hide my actual feelings on customer care from half-a-dozen assistant managers in coffee shops and chain restaurants all around the Midwest. Five years of teaching swimming lessons to young children had simply trained me to be dishonest in a less cynical, more fanciful way, and corporate America was markedly less interested in the pirates, piranhas and talking foxes that allegedly inhabited our municipal pools.
Prior to my brief stay under the golden arches, I had failed to make it past the application itself.
Pressured by my parents to land a job at a coffee shop which conveniently neighbored their workplace, I learned that the journey to becoming a barista was a philosophical and moral one.
Besides name, contact information and references, the only two questions posed were, ""Would you be willing to work without adequate compensation?"" and, ""Is there any kind of work you would refuse to perform?""
It was a measure of how far my education had overreached my common sense that I spent the next 15 minutes pondering indentured servitude and the conflict of duty and morality, two topics that seemed to invite longer reflections than the single blank line provided for each response would allow.
Whether the questions were meant to be taken at face value or were just there to screen for sarcasm, I handed in my paperwork relatively sure that my respective answers of ""Adequate compensation would be appreciated"" and ""Mink farming"" would place me toward the bottom of the applicant pile.
There are books on the strategy of the job search as thick and imposing as the Oxford English Dictionary, so it's clear I'm not the only one lost in the application process.
But as much as I learn to better inflate my accomplishments and obscure my weaknesses, I can't shake the idea that any employment gained through lying and deceit is likely to be unfulfilling and short-lived.
I only hope that when it's time to begin a career, I find a job that appreciates me for qualities I don't have to exaggerate, like my thick head of hair or my fear of spiders.
Want to earn a competitive salary? Enjoy working with mink? E-mail hunziker@wisc.edu.
