Wednesday, May 30, 2007

the adventures of Flat Stanley in AZ

You know how, in a job interview, you'll sometimes be asked, "What's your biggest flaw?"

The standard advice is to take some positive characteristic and turn it around: "I care too much," or some such.

It's all pretty much garbage, right? Verbal filler to get you through that interminable length of time before you can shake the applicant's hand and usher him or her out, pleasantly, yes, but with profound relief. (I once did a college recruiting tour for my first employer -- I would rather be stuck with hot pokers than ever have to do that again.)

As a veteran interviewer, I routinely ignored those standard "too much of a good thing" replies. But today I realized maybe I was too hasty all those years ago, because today was proof that I really can be insanely meticulous about some things. Witness the 13-printed-page Flat Stanley letter I just wrote to send back to my godson.

DH thinks I went overboard, and I probably did. But it is a really awesome, quick overview of some of the cool history, and natural history, of Arizona. It is by no means complete but it does cover a lot of topics, and it's mostly photos, anyway. Of course putting this together necessitated a trip to the Mesa Southwest Museum, but that's not something anyone around here ever complains about.

What a day. Ultrasound tomorrow morning at 6:50; I'm pretty sure this borderline obsessive behavior was unconsciously done to keep my mind off it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the more curious things is interviews. For most of the jobs I've actually had to interview for, the universal stoopid interviewer "what are your flaws" guestion generally brought this reponse from me.

"I don't have any."

Heh, heh, heh. Stopped the interview dead in it's tracks. I would just sit there and wait to see what was next.

As to obsessive - you?

Nah.

Unknown said...

Very nice. We got a ton of Flat Stanley requests when I worked for Gov. Bush in Austin; we had some sort of form letter to handle it. They were the bane of our education correspondent's existence, IIRC.