How the Liar Got His Background Check
A Just So Story of Old New York
So it was in New York City back in the olden hairy husky days of the early Millennium, oh my Best Beloved, these of course being the dark days before Social Media. The Man Child - being a primitive, backwards sort - used his Cell Phone for making calls, and the Phone Company charged him by the Minute.
On occasion the primitive Man Child left his musty moss-covered cave and found himself caught away from his computer. And then, my Best Beloved, he and his friends had to check their email at gathering spots called Internet Cafes. And in these old cold shivery days before the world was lit by the fiery glow of the ever-present Screens there was a method of sharing very important information called the Newspaper. It gathered very important News stories in one collection of printed pages much like the News Feed of today, only these very important News stories were not allowed to be posted unless they had been verified as true.
And in this Newspaper there was a section called “The Classifieds.” And in The Classifieds you could find tiny little bug-size advertisements for everything, from Jobs to Housing to a Willing Sexual Partner. And even though these ads were tiny, my Best Beloved, they were powerful, for it was the money that people paid to place these ads that paid the salaries of many of the Journalists who wrote the very important News Articles that filled the rest of the paper. And so, it is in The Classified Section of a once-mighty Newspaper called The Village Voice that our story truly begins…
Back in the 2000s, I found myself between jobs. I had done two seasons on a Vh1 pop culture show, and I was three months away from landing a full-time writing job.
And so I did what we used to do in the olden days before LinkedIn and its AInspirational Stories®, when the world was green and your humble narrator had two good knees. I consulted the HELP WANTED section of the Voice.
In my personal opinion, the “Help” that was wanted by many of the people who placed the ads were either psychiatric (seeing as many of the people who placed “Rock Star Wanted” ads were pure d nuts) or legal (judging by the many interviews for scam jobs/pyramid schemes I ended up on).
I found an ad though, whose headline read, “Reference Verifiers Wanted.” Now, if you ever looked for work in New York City at that time, you know exactly the ad I’m talking about. It was in the Voice longer than those “escort” ads in the back. I’d always been curious, but I’d never applied because it didn’t even give you a phone number, just an address to apply in person five days a week.
But basic cable pop culture commentary didn’t make enough money to build a solid nest egg with, and I had my rent coming up, so I figured, “Can I afford to be so snobbish? Goldman Sachs ain’t exactly knocking down my door with executive positions. What could I lose?” So I packed my resume and a sack lunch and made my way to 8th Ave. in the thirties.
The “Help” that was wanted by many of the people who placed the ads was usually psychiatric.
I was a young comedian in New York at the tail end of an era when a young broke creative could still afford to live, if not terribly well. I had started at Queens College at the same time I had started at open mics, and had dropped out after a semester and a half to go on a tour. Since then, I had taken a mix of good jobs that I found personally and creatively satisfying, interspersed with crappy disposable jobs I could drop any time I got something better.
If I had to describe my resume in terms of the sort of book review you’d find in, say, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, it would be: “A fantastic work of ‘historic fantasy,’ that blends true events with fantastic flights of fancy.” Yes, there were a couple of small lies in there, like “Hey, I graduated college.” Again, this was before the Age of the Internet, when you could still lie about your past. Now you have to spend a full decade artfully constructing that lie over multiple platforms.
I want you to picture me walking up a flight of stairs, grasping a handrail that had chipped over decades of use but had been recently varnished to what seemed an approximation of the wood’s original dark chocolate brown. Now imagine, oh my Best Beloved, that it is illuminated by bare bulbs in red metal cages, each step a metal plate colored with the same white paint as the walls. And these steps creaked like the Bamboo of the Senegal woodlands under my feet. And as you picture this, I want you to remember: I was clutching this document to an alternate history of work and education as I prepared to apply for a job with a company whose entire function was to verify if job applicants’ resumes contained the truth.
As I entered, to my left was an office with a receptionist’s desk between the main entrance and the door.
To my right, a large waiting area filled with those desk/chair combos you got to sit in in high school. Over on a far wall, a bored woman behind a counter wearing a lab coat. Behind her are six numbered doors. A couple of them were open; inside were toilets.
I was the only person applying for a job that morning, and I was taken into the interviewing office by a really nice older gentleman with a thick Israeli accent – or so I guessed, I’m not good at guessing this sort of thing - and a huge white walrus moustache. As he explained the job to me, I kept realizing I had no idea what he was saying because I was spending that time staring at the moustache.
If I had to describe my resume in terms of the sort of book review you’d find in, say, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, it would be: “A fantastic work of ‘historic fantasy,’ that blends true historic events with fantastic flights of fancy.”
The first question this guy asked me was if I have ever done any drugs. He told me to come clean with him, because I will be tested later. Then he told me that one of the things this company does is drug testing for large companies that were - I got the impression - hiring poor people off the street to do dirty work. He described a scene to me of burly surly men lined down the stairs and around the corner, waiting to pee into a cup. In that moment, I pictured the woman sitting in his waiting area, behind a desk, wearing a lab coat and surrounded by empty piss cups. I could see a window into my immediate future. Then he told me about the job.
The company’s main focus was to go over people’s resumes who are applying for jobs at Fortune 500 companies, and check to make sure that everything written there is the 100% truth. This is what they do all day. Then he asked me about my college experience.
It wasn’t until many years later, when I was sitting at home alone watching The Sopranos and eating a grilled cheese sandwich, that I sat bolt upright as I was struck by a sudden realization: This was the point in the interview when I should have come clean, explained my entire situation, apologized for wasting his time, and gone home.
Instead, we had a fantastic conversation. He told me in the interview that he was going on vacation the next day, but he was so into the idea of hiring me that he was going to expedite the paperwork so that I can get working there as soon as my background check came back.
And then he placed me in a small room where I took a basic skills aptitude test; half-high school English and half-high school-level Math. I pondered, as I worked, on the fact that back in high school I had decided to not pay attention to Math on the grounds that never, ever, in the real world ,will I need to know how to compute fractions for any kind of job I would ever hold. And here I was, taking a test that asked me to compute fractions as a prerequisite for getting a job
It did not occur to me until I was writing this story right now this very minute that a reference verification business probably didn’t need to know how I would have done on the SATs, and that this was strictly to keep me occupied while they ran a background check on me. God damn it.
I finished the test quickly, and so, bored, began to notice that scattered around the table I’m testing on, was the entire series of Left Behind For Kids books. Left Behind is the fundamentalist Christian literary series about what happens when the Rapture happens and God’s Chosen Few must battle the Anti-Christ, an Israeli fella who takes control of the U.N.
I was called back into The Moustache Man’s office, where he leaned across his desk and confidentially asked if I want to “come clean” about anything on my resume before they conducted a background check. He specifically asked if I wanted to admit that I had lied about my schooling, just as one random example he could think of for instance.
Then I was given a drug test.
As I was leaving the office, walking down the stairs, each one creaking as I took a step, it hit me that my entire resume was a lie, that this company’s entire business plan was to catch lies on a resume, and that no matter how well our conversation went I was never going to get this job. And then a week later, I was invited to submit for a writing gig. And that is another story.
And so it is, Best Beloved, that from that day to this the Liar will always justify putting outrageous untruths on his resume, with the understanding that Corporations see it as a sign that he truly wants the job. But it is also true that from that day to this, the Corporations will always justify not hiring the Liar if he can't be clever enough to hide his tracks.
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