Long Day’s Journey to a Job Interview

This all started yesterday. Thanks to the miracle of hard water deposits, MojoFiction’s top-secret headquarters needed a new water heater. We knew we needed a new water heater because the old one told us so by emptying its contents onto the floor in a slow, but deliberate fashion. Like how a dog lets you know it has to pee by peeing all over the kitchen floor.

Thanks for the heads-up, dog.

Anyway, we called up a local professional and ordered the installation of a water heater. They didn’t like being ordered around, but then we offered to pay them so they agreed.

This morning we woke up fresh and ready to go. And by fresh we mean really exhausted because we had to get up at quarter to six and for some reason we did not sleep well. We blame this on a well-meaning friend who texted us at 3 a.m. to let us know about an Avengers movie trailer spoof, because, you know, that’s really freaking important. The text notice from our phone woke us up so, of course, we had to text back, “Why do you suck?” and then things went downhill from there because, for some reason, our friend was texting from his wife’s phone. Also, we probably could have also blamed our exhaustion on the back-to-back TV episodes of Hell’s Kitchen that kept us up late, but we won’t. We’ll blame our ex-friend. Nevertheless, we looked forward to a nice warm shower to get us going.

As you might imagine, when we turned on the hot water, nothing happened. The spout coughed and sputtered but mostly pushed out bursts of air with a mist of warmish water. Of course, we immediately flipped on our man-skills and went to the basement to inspect the water heater, which told us it was operating normally thanks to a red light that flashes intermittently. And that’s all we know about water heaters. So we cold-water-shaved and faked a shower (trust us, it can be done). Then we hopped in the car and headed to the train station.

We actually arrived at the station about an hour early because parking can be a problem. Of course, the lot was not even half full, meaning we could have slept in. How were we to know that lots of people take time off from work in December? Is this some kind of universal vacation month that we don’t know about?  A little warning would have been nice.

If you have MojoFiction on your fantasy team, here is our score so far: we got up at 5:45 a.m. to get to downtown Chicago for a 10 a.m. interview, the hot water didn’t work, and we were really tired. If you penciled in the word “insane” next to MojoFiction’s score, you win today’s prize (a dog that spends a lot of time in our kitchen – you’ll love him). It doesn’t usually work this way time-wise. It was the parking conundrum. Honestly.

We arrived in Chicago with way too much time on our hands, so we stopped at the food court in the train station and ate an unhealthy fast-food breakfast. In contrast to our mood, and the mood of the grumpy middle-aged commuters on our train ride in (who we usually laugh at), the all female staff at the food establishment was downright happy, friendly, and bright. How one energetic, positive person can turn around your entire day is a still a mystery to us. Seriously, we have nothing funny to say here.

Finally, a little before ten, we walked through the cold to the office building for our interview.

In … out … 30 minutes. All that travel for 30 minutes.

Actually, the interview went pretty well until we realized we were in the wrong building.  But the office workers there really liked talking to us so we might have a chance at whatever job they were offering (and we landed a date with a cute girl who works in their accounting department). Anyway, we finally went over to the correct interview, apologized for being late, and then fell asleep at their conference table.  So the interview probably went well, we’re not sure. As we nodded off, we thought we heard someone ask, “Did that guy shower today?”

The next train home wasn’t for 45 minutes, so we waited in a designated room by the tracks with other commuters and started reading a book. About two minutes later, a young man sat down and started playing some profanity-laced music through his phone. He had headphones, but it was loud. His eardrums must have disintegrated by now. The real problem was that he started singing along with it and he seemed to only like the swear words. Surprisingly, it turned out that everyone was glad to hear it and we all agreed that we hoped it would happen again soon. It was a totally awesome way to end the trip.

Of course, the water heater actually works fine, it just needed some time. But now the water is coming out milky, which is great because that means we don’t have to buy milk anymore.

So here we are at home, writing this blog thing, and a thought has just occurred to us. It’s interesting how many small events can factor in to one simple task.

When we tell people what we did on Thursday, December 11, 2014, we tell them, “We went downtown for a job interview.”

But it was a lot more than that, wasn’t it?