Julie's smile swallowed about three-quarters of her face. I did some mental math. She could certainly fit her entire fist in her mouth, plus most of her forearm and at least half a roll of quarters. Also, she loved me. I knew it. How could she not? I was a handsome young man with a rapier wit, wearing a blazer over a shirt with French cuffs. If she had loved me on the phone, she would adore me in person.

Things began swimmingly. We talked about Vermont and Atlanta. I gave her the story of my business career from, oh, I'd say about 7,200 feet. I tried to put my usual interview strategy into place: as soon as the pressure starts to rise, take control and ask as many intelligent questions as possible of the interviewer until time runs out. Ideally, get them to emote. If they emote, they'll forget to ask you any hardball questions and they'll walk away thinking you are brilliant just to salvage their pride. This had proved effective in the past.

The problem was that today, emoting was not listed on Julie's Outlook schedule. Asking seven specific questions of me was. Moreover, she hadn't just written her questions down, she had typed them out. I found this disconcerting, although I couldn't say why.

The first few were pretty basic questions about specific skills I'd developed in previous jobs. I fielded these with aplomb. I noticed that she had the "consultative seller's" habit of beginning a statement by repeating back what her interlocutor had just said, only in smaller (and in my case more precise) words. When she asked me to list the various functional areas that CogentResponse specialized in I kept coming up one or two short, but she'd merrily repeat my answers back to me, counting them off on her fingers until they added up to seven. Fortunately, each time she did so she'd forget one I had said and add one I didn't. This significantly reduced the pressure on me. Then Julie decided to escalate the level of inquiry to include the hypothetical.

"Let's say I'm the CFO of Sears Canada and you want to sell me on CR's service. How would you go about preparing for the call?"

Without wasting even a second to think, I was off and running. "Well, Julie, I'd begin by exhausting all available sources of public information related to the company, things like quarterly reports, analyst statements, press releases and things, any of the myriad things that constitute sources of practical and empirical insight into that business's state of affairs, its competitive advantage, its challenges related to change management, you know. I'd also try to find out his name."

"So, you're saying you'd look at their Web site. Great!" Her smile threatened to engulf her eyes. "Anything else?"

"Well, when I was doing sales research for the V.P. of corporate sales at FutureClicks I'd make a lot of deceptive phone calls to try to get information out of unsuspecting low-level managers. You know, pose as a reporter or an analyst or something. You must do that all the time, hey?"

"So, you're saying you'd call their headquarters and lie. No, I don't really do much of that." When her smile disappeared, it was the close of a Venus' flytrap. She removed a pen from the CogentResponse cup on her desk and made a note in a notebook exactly like my own. Then she resumed the interrogation.

"What do you think about having a $2M quota? Does that scare you at all?" I flipped a mental coin. Judging by the intense worry she'd expressed about hitting her fourth-quarter goals during our phone conversation, it was clear that for Julie $2M was a number to be respected and feared, like a wolf in your living room. When the mental coin clanged to rest in the vast empty warehouse of my mind, I told her the result.

"Scare's the hell out of me, Julie. And I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't feel that way. But fear is a great motivator." I gave the right answer. The flytrap opened and I emerged, sticky but alive and undigested. She made another note.

"What do you want to be doing in 10 years, Andrew? I mean, what do you want to be when you grow up?" She smiled even wider this time, and I swore I could see what she had for breakfast. I thought about this, thinking about how the lowest level of hell was a middle-management position, how I'd like to craft brilliant literary fiction in a house on a hill overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Any of these things would have been fine to say. But instead I said the wrong thing.

"You know, I don't think we ever really know the answer to that question, Julie." She nodded, one of those plastic clowns at the fair through whose open mouth you can throw a basketball to win a stuffed chimp. She seemed to be right there with me, so I decided I'd make a little joke. "I mean, I asked my grandfather that same question when I saw him last week."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing, actually. He was dead. Still warm, though. Died about 45 minutes before I got there." To let her know I was just engaging in a little black humor, I let my eyes well up with tears.

"I'm sorry." This time her mouth was just gaping, and it didn't look nearly as big as when she smiled.

"He was retired anyway, so I think he liked that just fine. But that's what I'd like to be when I grow up. Not dead. Retired." I sighed, just to put her at ease. There was a knock on the window behind me. Our time was up. I rose. Julie rose. She reached out to shake my hand, but remained behind her desk.

On my way down the hall to take a 45-minute break before my next interview I realized that when she said "I'm sorry" she might not have been expressing her regret for my loss.

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