At the local savings and loan, where I made one of many
initial attempts to find a job, I was asked to take a test, which consisted of
several mathematical problems on about the sixth grade level. It was insulting.
Then after making several phone calls inquiring about a job I’d seen in the
newspaper, I landed an interview with a branch of the Household Finance Company
over in Lowell and thought I’d finally hit pay dirt. I drove our six-cylinder
Dodge van, which had no power steering over to hilly Lowell. There were no
available parking spaces on the road in front of HFC and I finally had to face
the fact that I’d have to parallel park on an upward slope of a nearby street.
It was hell trying to maneuver that van. Luckily I was an expert parallel
parker, but between the hill and the lack of power steering, I broke out in a
sweat before achieving success.
The young man who greeted me when I arrived was about my
same age, and his officious manner was anything but pleasant. We shook hands
and I sat down in an uncomfortable seat in front of his banged up Steele Case
desk, and smoothed the skirt of my power suit. After several uninteresting
questions he said, “Well, as a matter of procedure, we ask all our applicants
to take a personality test.”
A personality test?
He ushered me to a back room where he asked me to take a
seat at a school desk. “Take as long as you like,” he generously said as he
handed me six pages of questions and a number two pencil. In all, there were
probably about 200 questions. They were all phrased in exactly the same format
with the only difference being the last word: “Which would you rather (do , be,
say, think about, try)?” A list of four items was then given and the
instructions read: Mark with an X the item in the list you would MOST like.
Mark with an O the item in the list you would LEAST like. Sounded easy enough.
I was about halfway through before I started to get
suspicious about the reason for this test. (I was a bit naive.) I came to the
following question:
Which would you rather do?
- Go to a baseball game
- Go to a wrestling match
- Go to the symphony
- Go to a Broadway musical
My antennae went up on this one because it seemed so obvious
that, in general, men would answer one way and women would answer another. If I
were a guy, I’d probably put an X next to either the baseball game or the
wrestling match and an O next to the symphony or Broadway musical. I knew I was
generalizing but I couldn’t help it. Now that I was tuned into the possibility,
it seemed that every question was written with a gender or sexual orientation
bias.
The final validating moment came around question number 175.
I read:
What would you rather be?
- Stupid
- Lazy
- Mean
- Nice
I knew in an instant the answer I should select for this
proverbial lynchpin question—the only answer that I suspect HFC was really
interested in. If I put an X next to Mean
and an O next to Lazy, I was sure
to get this job. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because it wasn’t true. Besides,
the place was a pit of an office, the drive over to Lowell was depressing, and
parking was impossible. I looked around the dingy interior with its worn
carpet, its walls in disrepair, and thought about the personality of the only
prospective co-worker I had met, and decided I didn’t want the job. I wanted to
flunk this test. I gleefully answered that I would MOST like to be Lazy and LEAST like to be Mean. I put my number two pencil down with a smile, waved
good-bye to Mr. I’m-So-Great-Cuz-I-Work-For-HFC, and left Lowell for good.
Within a few weeks, I settled for a clerical position in the
mortgage service department at the local savings and loan in order to get
medical benefits. Within 18 months, I relocated for my husband’s next job, and
started the whole job search process again. Except this time, it involved a
switch in career path, from banking to educational communications—a change that
has proven to be very rewarding. And I didn’t even have to be Mean.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2014
