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During the first summer following my college graduation, I was living at home, dreading each morning with a dread usually reserved for those grieving the loss of a loved one. Gone were the tumultuous, bacchanalian joys of college life; enter the monotony of my father’s mantra: “Find a job yet?”

Late-1980s Pittsburgh, where I grew up, was not an especially booming job market. Compounding the problem were the tools themselves – there were no job boards on the internet (nor was there an internet). One had to physically type up a resume and cover letters and physically take them to a printer for copying and physically mail them out. If you found a typo after the guy at the print shop handed you a hundred copies of your resume, you were screwed. Then there was the waiting: did the post office actually deliver the damned thing? Did the company lose it? Were they going to ever even call me? With the internet, you know pretty much instantly; back in the days, you needed the patience of Job. Then you’d get the letter: We regret to inform you, it would begin; even worse was how it ended: however, we will keep your resume on file…as if someone, some day, would arbitrarily blow the dust off your resume and shout ‘Eureka!’

But, somehow, despite all odds and after several weeks, I managed to land an unpaid internship with the local PBS affiliate, WQED.

“Let me get this straight,” my father said when I told him. “You work and they don’t pay you?”

My father was an academic, a professor, and as such, he’d had little exposure to the real world. “Kind of like graduate students, huh?” I chimed in.

A look of cruel understanding flashed across his face. Of course, he was annoyed that I wasn’t getting paid but, still, it was a step in the right direction. A sort purgatory faced by college graduates who didn’t manage straight A’s, ace every test they ever took in school, or – most importantly – have a well-placed parent or friend. In other words, 99.9% of the graduating population.

On my first day at QED, I arrived at the poured concrete building on Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue extremely hungover on one of those hot, humid days that makes weathercasters happy – a giant ‘L’ floating over Ohio that seems to stay there all summer. Head pounding, I checked in with the receptionist who told me to sit in the waiting room. I went for a brand new Pittsburgh Magazine – television station reception areas clearly had one up on dentist’s or doctor’s offices. In front of me, an entire wall was lined with some 25 TV sets showing a single program. It took a while to register but it was a PBS special about headaches. A college graduate with a major in English, the irony was not lost on me. The thumping in my head was being illustrated before me, with 25 snaking blood vessels throbbing.

“Hello,” I heard a kind voice behind me say. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

I turned slowly. This is you first job, I was saying to myself. Attempt enthusiasm. “Yes,” I said, extending my hand. “It’s my first d-“

“I’m Fred,” he said. It was Mr. Rogers. Mr. Fred Rogers of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” fame. The show had been filmed in these very studios, in Mr. Rogers’ hometown of Pittsburgh. And though I had heard that he even lived for a time in my parents’ upscale suburb, I had never seen him in person before now.

“Must be that new intern Marina hired,” he said in the same sing-songy voice I had heard for all those years. “You’re Paul, right?”

“Yeah,” I said and told him my name, shaking his hand. He was thin, with graying hair, neatly dressed…hell, think of the show – that was him. Very pleasant, flirting with the notion of being too pleasant but a hair’s breadth from it. He gazed not unkindly about me, smiling blithely, though I got the sense that he knew I was hungover. Great, I thought. You are in standing in front of your childhood idol, and you stink of beer. Not good.

“See you around,” he said, turning on his heel just as he did at the end of each episode.

‘Bye, neighbor, I thought. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor, would you be mine? Could you be mine?

The job pretty much sucked from that point on, and after the eight weeks, I was relieved when Marina and I sort of reached the amicable conclusion that we’d be better off dating other people. So for the remainder of the summer, I went back to a trade I knew well: working on my father’s property – digging ditches, planting trees, that sort of thing. Of course, I also typed cover letters and sent out resumes with the voracity of a newspaper columnist. It wasn’t until the end of summer that I landed an interview – a real job interview.

I’m pretty sure I was nervous but, to be honest, I don’t remember much of the interview, though I do remember having no idea how I did. It seemed pretty odd to me: you spend half an hour asking and answering stupid questions – “Is there parking? Is it free?” or “Career-minded? Me? Uh, yeah, sure, I, uh, guess so” – and you leave having no idea whether you were impressive or anecdotal. I once interviewed this guy who…

“Did you…” my father started as I walked into the kitchen following that first interview. “Did you get the job?” This was asked not out of genuine interest in my career aspirations, but was, in fact, a favorite joke of my father’s.

There was a television ad in the 1970s that started with the point of view of a television. There is the sound of a door closing, and a previously-unseen, older black woman emerges, startled, from the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV. At that point, you could never figure out what in the hell the ad was about: was the intruder about to commit a terrible crime against this poor woman? Was there news about a horrible tragedy about to unfold? In any case, the anguished woman approaches the camera. When she gets there, she stutters, “D-did you get the job?” Now the camera cuts to a young black man with a look of utter reticence on his face. I cannot remember who sponsored the ad – the NCAAP, perhaps – but its effect was profound. At least to my father, who relished any opportunity to repeat the line.

“Yep,” I said. “In fact, they offered me the CEO position on the spot.”

“You better get a job pretty quickly, smart ass,” my father said mirthlessly.

I spent most of that autumn ripping out an enchanted forest of rhododendrons.

I also watched a lot of TV. Another favorite television commercial from that time asks, “Do you know anything…high tech?” This is posed by an older man who addresses the camera with a pained expression, as if saying these words caused physical harm. (Had I been cast in the ad, I would have responded, “Absolutely”, so as to put him out of his misery.) Perhaps it was that commercial, or the fact that my father taught computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University, but I started to gravitate towards information technology. I read books and audited a couple of classes at CMU, adding a litany of quixotic terms to my resume. Eventually, I landed a job with a small consulting firm, gradually working my way into increasingly senior positions and hopping from firm to firm.

Throughout this “career” of mine, I’ve had the opportunity to interview hundreds of people, and I can tell in less than five minutes whether or not the candidate will work out. Because that’s really what it’s about: do I even like this person? Whether or not they can do the job is secondary to the prospect of spending hours upon hours in an office environment with them. You never want to be the person known around the office as the guy who hired that guy whom no one else can stand.

On one week-long recruiting trip for one or another of my many employers, I interviewed sixteen people a day for five straight days. Superman could have been across from me in that tiny room that final day, and I would not have remembered him. “’S’ on chest? Pretty sure. Wearing a cape? Not so sure.” Earlier in the week, I interviewed this Chinese guy with PhDs in two or three other disciplines. He wore a polyester tie, and it looked like he combed his hair with a cat. As far as I could tell through a viscous Mandarin accent, his answers to the technical questions were perfect. However, his “interpersonal” skills were weak, to say the least. This was not someone you wanted talking to your valued clients. This was someone you chained to a desk in the basement.

“What not like!” he said with the enthusiasm of a birthday party full of four-year-olds, when asked if he liked writing code. When we were wrapping up and got to the “do you have any questions for me” portion of the interview, he asked the only question he or any other foreign national cared about: “Do company sponsor H1 visa?” I sympathized: getting a green card must be like winning an Olympic gold medal. So I told him I wasn’t sure. Before he even began formulating his next inquiry, I stopped him. Did he have any other technical questions? He paused and shook his head. I finished the interview by telling him any other question he had should be directed to the management of the company, specifically someone from the indispensable HR staff.

If those who cannot teach teach gym, then people who can’t do anything work in human resources. And those who do not know anything technology-related invariably wind up as technical recruiters. The technical recruiter’s sole purpose is to screen candidates so that the people who actually know the stuff don’t waste their time talking to people who don’t. These are the people who comb job boards and web sites like Monster or Career Builder, searching to find any number of “hits” and subsequently flood the internet with emails about “exciting opportunities” with “only the best” companies. Most inquiries end up as cyber trash, never to be unearthed from the digital recycling bins of the world. I continue to get these emails, as well, though I think the last time I updated my resume, Clinton (Bill, not Hill) was still president.

The other day I got an email from one or another tech company. I wasn’t doing anything so, what the heck, I responded that I was indeed a “team player” whose skills might compliment the “dynamic environment” of a “different kind of company.” The recruiter responded that my skills and experience appeared to be a “synergistic” match with the “corporate culture”, and we agreed on a date to meet in person. So I went to the office in my gray flannel suit, where I was met by an attractive woman who introduced herself as Lori. She was twenty-something years old in a white blouse and black Ann Taylor jacket and skirt, and she led me towards a small, windowless office.

We started off with some small talk – about the weather (which was yucky) and the Steelers: “I cannot wait for training camp” Lori said in a born-and-raised-here Pittsburgh accent. I nodded or smiled; suddenly I wasn’t sure about going through with this. Then she told me a little about the company, its founders, philosophy, and clientele – all the junk you read in the “About Us” page of the public web site. When she got to the “why we’re different” part, I sighed a little more loudly than I wanted to; she seemed to roll her eyes in agreement, still talking. Then she asked me about myself and my career; I shot into a diatribe about the alphabet soup of technological acronyms and cute names, most real but some made up just see if she were paying attention.

“Yellow Panther Claw is a Java-based daemon that runs on Apache Tomcat,” I was saying. “And I’m going to open source YPC because I’ve leveraged so much that others have freely given,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she muttered, studying my resume. She looked confused or thirsty; maybe she had an embarrassing itch.

“Can I ask you something,” I said.

Lori seemed to perk up a bit. “Sure,” she said.

“Do you have any idea what I am talking about? Really?” I said quietly, moving closer. “I mean the acronyms, the talk of architectures, protocols, and platforms – it’s pretty much Greek, right?”

She shook her head somewhat embarrassedly after a moment. She smiled, regained her composure, ready to ask another question.

“It’s okay,” I said reassuringly. “I’ve known CIOs and CTOs who don’t understand a damned thing either.” I proceeded to tell her about a former CEO I’d met who’d recently bought an island off the coast of Maine. He was describing his new boat, when someone asked him if he found it difficult to pilot, being so large. The guy was embarrassed to admit that he didn’t drive the boat – he had a captain for that. It was like the business adage that the fewer keys you had, the more important you must be.

“You had the keys to the boat?” she asked.

No, I told her. We were actually on my island. I told her that my island wasn’t as big as my friend’s and even though I might be forced to captain my own vessel, it was still my island. I told her I was thinking about seceding form the U.S., forming my own sovereign nation, but it wasn’t as easy as it looked. You have to draft a constitution, after all, and while we could peg our currency, the Paul, to the dollar, there were policy decisions that needed to be made. What was our stand on global warming? Would we ratify the Kyoto Accord before the U.S.? And what of ‘our neighbor’? Imagine the ramifications of establishing most-favored trading status with countries not friendly with the U.S. when you had to hop on a boat, passport in hand, to get beer and beef jerky from the 7-Eleven?

She was helpful, however, when it came to the flag.

“I think a ‘P’ in the center is a definite,” she said. “Maybe some colors – magenta or greens – those are in. And some sort of pattern, maybe, or just a big anteater.”

“Actually, I’m thinking earth tones,” I said. “I don’t want to be perceived as just some passing fancy, like Czechoslovakia.”

A couple of weeks later, when I tried to follow up, I found out she’d been let go. I felt sort of bad, but then decided she wasn’t cut out to be a technical recruiter. A waitress or a painter, sure, but not a recruiter. The company didn’t seem to want to continue the dialogue with me either, which was fine because they will never be able get visas to my island. It probably won’t matter anyway because there are only two positions currently available: ditch digger and the role of the Lavender Panda on “Paul’s Neighborhood,” an homage to the late, great Mr. Rogers and the only sanctioned television program that currently runs on my island.