Getting a Job and You, Chapter 3: The Interview

Times are bleak: the economic downturn has left literally hundreds of Americans without jobs, most of those hundreds (if one is to trust the news) high level executives who have not had to interview for a job in 30+ years. Not only are they old and recently bankrupt with no clue even how to feed themselves without a nurse who costs 12 G's every six weeks, they are at a huge disadvantage in the job market: their skills are honed but limited, and most of them probably wouldn't know how to apply for a job if you bit them... with a job.
I, on the other hand, am a young and experienced job applicant. In my 22 years, I've successfully applied to thousands of jobs ranging from Astronaut to Agronomist.
I've interviewed for positions I didn't even know how to pronounce, and have always exited the interview with a promising, “We'll let you know.” Therefore, as a service during these dark times, I'm going to convey some “Job Interview Tips and Tactics,” which I have picked up over the years. Use them, and I guarantee you will leave a lasting impression which will last...
“Job Tips And Tactics”
an exposition by Brandon Stauffer
writing as Patterson Patterson

The first step is to get your foot in the door. Usually sending in a job application over the internet or delivering your resume to the employer works, but if both of these fail, putting your actual foot in the door works just as well.
However, if you're going to use a resume, use it right. Make sure you follow these tips:
- Use colorful paper which will catch the eye and say, “Look at me! I am a fun person and just the one you want to hire! Thank you for your time!” Make sure the paper has a theme, for instance, if you're applying for a teaching job, make sure it has giant clip art pencils and misspelled words scrawled on it, but if you're looking at an office job, try giant clip art pencils and staplers. Whatever the case, you pretty much can't go wrong with giant clip art pencils on your resume somewhere.
- Make it interesting by using different fonts for different categories!!! (Also exclamation points!!!) (Always three!!!)
- Bold every third word. This is an old trick which helps draw attention to your resume, subtly.

Those are the three main things to remember for a resume. As long as you have those, you're sure to get an interview.
Now the interview process can be nerve-wracking for some, but the key is to channel that inherent nervousness into a positive... channel. Using the bathroom beforehand also helps.

PRO-TIP:Wait until they're ready to see you in their office, then ask to use the bathroom. This lets them know that you're just a regular person who also uses the bathroom, starting you off on common ground. You can start the interview off on a casual note by discussing this common ground. Unless your employer isn't a regular person who also uses the bathroom. Then I don't recommend this.

Now you're in the room. The key here is to make the interview as intimate and memorable as possible. Think of it as a sort of date wherein you want to make the best impression possible. So there are a few to-do's here to make sure you get started running in the right direction:
-Sit as close to the employer as possible. You don't want anything in between you to disrupt your flow of communication. He may ask you to have a seat on the opposite side of the desk from him. This is one of the first screening tests: don't let it happen! Tell him you would be more comfortable sitting on his side of the desk in a chair next to him. If he refuses, cite religion. This also lets him know you have a good moral character. In fact, cite religion to start with.
- Now that you're sitting on his side of the desk, turn your chair to where you are facing him and, now this part is extremely important (meaning job or no job important), maintain unbroken eye contact with him. Start when you sit down, and don't stop until you are actually outside the door. Eye contact means respect, and employers know that better than anyone. Do NOT break eye contact for any reason WHATSOEVER!!!
- Put your hand on his thigh. This opens a physical pathway of communication and makes the whole interview more intimate and memorable, and those two things are the keys to getting a job. Your hand on his thigh is completely necessary and useful in many ways which I will enumerate shortly.

What you may not know is that the interview process is typically very boring. The employers have to ask the same stupid questions to the same basic people for days on end before finally selecting one candidate who could just as easily have been picked out of a hat. Most candidates are trained to sound exactly the same in an interview.
“What's your greatest strength?”
I work well with others.
“What's your greatest weakness?”
I'm a bit of a perfectionist.
You do not want to be perceived as a dummy like everyone else. One who mouths the words that are fed to him by some unseen puppetmaster. You are an individual! And you need to convey that in the interview as much as you do in your ever day life! There's only one major tip to consider here and that's:

Start with a joke. And continue with jokes throughout the interview process. The key with jokes is that they satisfy the two factors of a successful interview: intimacy and remembrance. They bring your employer in on something that you two alone can share, and trust me, he won't soon forget the person who came into his office and, when asked, “What's your greatest weakness?” responded, “Chocolate Cake!” Sharing a laugh is like sharing a wife or girlfriend. Both sharers are let in on something secret and special that gives both parties great joy. Jokes are the way to get jobs. But I can't make your jokes for you. You are an individual: express yourself!

I mentioned earlier about the importance of your hand on his thigh. Let me go a little more in depth, as this is the single most important thing I have to share with you.
The subtle motions of your hands are the physical communiques your employer needs to really understand you and want to hire you. The smallest squeeze or tickle could set off the neural impulse that says, “I must give the job to this one.” So how can you properly utilize this most important of tactics? There are several options to consider:
1.Squeezing -
Use a gentle squeeze both when you share a laugh at one of your jokes and when you want to convey something that you feel makes you good for the position. This way, the employer will have a sense memory of both the good times you shared and the critical moments of the interview where you made it clear the job could easily be yours.
2.Tapping -
Again, use this whenever you really want the employer to listen to what you're saying. It's often a good idea to use this in conjunction with squeezing: get his attention, then make the memory stick.
3.Working your way up -
For the more intimate moments of the interview, move your hand closer to his genitals. Not too much, but certainly noticeably. This will let the employer know that you look forward to a close working relationship with him, also when added to the unbroken eye contact, this tactic can be lethal (where lethal means you will most assuredly get the job). Now are you beginning to see just how important the physical contact can be?
4.Corporate ladder (ADVANCED INTERVIEWERS ONLY!) -
If you're reading this, that means you're probably only a novice interviewer, so you definitely shouldn't try this, but I thought I would mention it anyways to give you a taste of what you can do when you've reached a more advanced level.
During the more playful parts of the interview, use your index and middle finger to make a hand representation of a little man standing on his thigh. Then make your “little man” walk up his leg by making a kind of scissor motion with your fingers.
Say, “Looks like he's CLIMBING THE CORPORATE LADDER!”
You will share a hearty laugh and will simultaneously achieve the intimacy of working your way up. This action can be prolonged by walking him back down the other leg and saying, “OOPS! Looks he's gonna go AROUND THE WORLD!!!”
This is a handy trick because it accomplishes so many things at once, but as I said before, I would not recommend this to a novice.

Thank you for reading this basic course in job interviewing; however, it should be noted that I cannot officially guarantee that this will land you a job. In these dark economic slumpy times, they are looking for more than novice level interviewing skills for the best jobs.
But, if you listen to my 10 cassette tape series, “Getting a Job and You!” or watch my instructional DVD, “The Things You Can Share During a Job Interview!” I CAN guarantee that that job will be yours!
I CAN guarantee that YOU will be the best CANdidate for the job! If you do those things I just mentioned.
Thank you for your time!


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The Dead Painter

The painter was famous for his vanity, or at least that's what the critics all said. Ever since he had been a teenager and first picked up a brush and tried his hand at art, he had grown rich on nothing but self-portraits. His first exhibition, age nineteen, had been in a small loft apartment where alcohol was poured freely and drugs were shared. His first line of cocaine left his nose bleeding that night, and he had taken a picture of his drug-ruined face and painted it the next day.
Then his face was brown and youthful and strong, and the drugs had made his eyes red. A critic who had seen this painting had said, "There is blood here. More than is seen. There is blood beneath, as well." Many times he had been offered countless sums of money for this painting, but instead he had decided to keep it. It was the first painting he hung in his private gallery.
Now an old man, the painter moved about in his gallery, purveying the ruined landscape of his life captured in these images. The gallery formed a spiral toward the center, starting with his earliest paintings on the outer rim, and moving to his later paintings toward the center. In his meander through the dimly lit rooms, he could trace his entire world: his changing perception of art, his changing perception of beauty, his changing perception of self. He took it all in, starting with that first one that he had kept, with a bloody nose and eyes widened by cocaine, a look of surprise or shock or awe plastered on what was his innocent visage.

He had only painted self-portraits his whole life. Never a Van Gogh landscape or an O'Keefe flower, a Picasso table or a Magritte pipe, a Degas ballerina or a Toullouse-Latrec harem; although, many critics said that the painter had emulated each of these in turn. And maybe he had, but never with a purpose. When asked, he had said that he only painted what he knew, and what he knew best was himself.

He walked by a few early works and stopped at a charcoal he had done when he was twenty-five. In the foreground was a woman wrapped in his bedsheets, frozen in a pirouette, in the background a mirror portrayed the painter steadfastly drawing on a tablet, staring not at the girl nor at the tablet, but directly into the mirror.
The painter remembered this drawing very vividly. The first exhibition where it had been displayed, there had been a great deal of talk about him being portrayed in the background in one of his drawings. This was easily his most successful piece that night, and he had planned to sell it for top dollar.
By this time he had grown out of loft apartments and was now in the business, showing his work at the trendiest art galleries in the region: this one was in a basement painted entirely blood red with extremely bright lights behind the walls that made the room seem to glow, to be illuminated somehow within.
He had brought a leading critic to that piece, hanging exalted in the middle of the room, and had asked what the critic thought. The painter had smiled with foreknowledge that the review would be gleaming, and it was, but after the critic had finished his deconstruction, the painter, whose smile had faded into a grimace, had torn down the work with such violence that part of the wall came with it suddenly filling the room with a blinding light. Bathed in the light, he had announced that all offers for the drawing were null and void, he would keep it for himself.
The next day, he broke off his engagement to the dancer in the drawing and painted a portrait of a miserable, bloodshot, tear-streaked eye which he titled, "My Sorry Self."

Wandering still deeper into his gallery, he watched as his paintings progressed - or rather decomposed - along with his life. Here a painting of him with a whore, there a depiction of himself through an empty bottle, and eventually a particularly violent painting wherein he was stabbing a well-dressed man in the
middle of the street.
The well-dressed man had been a young critic who had idolized the painter from the first piece he had seen, also age nineteen. The artist had grown older by this time and embraced the chance for young and hopeful companionship. He had said that he saw a little bit of himself inside the young critic, like a flame that once burned within himself, "and which maybe still did." The critic was overwhelmed, and they spent a lot of time drinking together and discussing art and beauty and women. The painter grew fonder and fonder of his companion as they found their views had more and more in common.
One evening, the painter had the young critic over to his apartment, where they commonly drank and discussed, and the painter decided to show the critic a new piece he had been working on. He brought out the canvas and stood it in front of his television. The critic was breathless. He said that the piercing blue eyes of the painting were the most beautiful things he had ever seen, then the painter stopped him and kissed him and they made love in front of the bright blue eyes of the self-portrait.
When they finished, the critic turned to the painting and tried to analyze it, the painter kissed his back and neck where the brown hair faded into skin. The critic said, "It's so strange."
"What's strange?"
"You don't have blue eyes. Your eyes are green. Why did you change their color?"
When the critic left, the painter tried to correct the eye color, but after a few strokes realized that he had ruined the painting in the attempt. In a blind rage which bordered on an infuriated trance, he tore at the painting and when he finished, before him was a painting of himself stabbing the young critic in cold
blood.
The painter resolved never to see the critic again.

The painter finally reached the very center of the gallery where there sat a blank canvas, a chair, painting supplies on a nearby cabinet, and a mirror. He sat down at the canvas and thought about his age and his life and thought that before he died, he should paint one more thing. So he decided to paint himself dead.
He worked feverishly, mixing reds and blues and yellows to achieve an ideal palate, using long strokes, short strokes, he painted and his naked body on the floor. He painted every liver spot on his body, every tired wrinkle and imperfection. He made his skull, his neck, torso, arms, and legs and they all looked completely devoid of life. And he sat there painting until he was completely finished, which took more than twenty hours.
At the end, he sat back, hunched and exhausted, and looked at his final painting. He looked for a long time, and he was confused because the self-portrait didn't look like him at all.
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