Look how good she is with animals

I bite into the hamburger, on which I requested jalapeno peppers since I repeatedly forget they hurt, using the sting as an excuse to pause while formulating my interview questions. I cool the spice with a fry and ketchup before launching into the next. "What do you see as your greatest professional failing?"

Amber shifts in her chair, the squeak beneath her notice, but not the notice of the family dining beside us. "I don't know. Do I have any?"

"You can't ask the interviewer if you have any flaws!" She traces her tongue over her teeth because she just came from the dentist, looking anxiously around the restaurant as though this were an actual interview and not practice for the one she would endure the following day. "Your flaw is that you are a perfectionist. You want to do each task so well that you sometimes focus too hard. The positive of that - which you leave unspoken - is that you end up being detail focused and a team player."

"I hate group projects," she reminds me.

"You don't for the purposes of this interview, which is just a formality. You have the job." This is not husbandly confidence, or not exclusively. After agonizing over the phrasing and the necessity of writing it, she sent the veterinary hospital at which she had been interning a letter stating that she would be interested in staying on if they would pay her. Her supervisor asked Amber if she wished to work for them, but Amber refused to believe me that this was as good as offering her a job.

Amber has only ever had faint success in the professional world, inhibited by both the low expectations of those who encountered her - a tiny, spirited brunette with a high voice - and her own social anxiety. This internship forced her to continually prove herself, manifested as answering the doctors' trick questions so well that they stopped asking them. Whatever deficits remain in her, she has more than compensated for them.

Over the course of the decade before I found my current position (which I earned in part because I had given up on interviews being anything more than exercises), I had been through more interviews than I could count. I knew the commonalities in questioning, ostensibly gleaned from the same leadership books or a quick web search of "what to ask in interviews?" I had sat before one bored person or six rapid firing me questions. I had men in gelled hair spend half an hour asking me the same questions phrased fractionally differently to see if they could trip me up. I slogged through cattle calls where the interview was nothing more than dropping resumes in a milk crate after waiting in line for an hour. I was made to teach classes - not as a test of my skills as much as to save on hiring a sub for that period - and told I was overqualified to bother continuing the interview. I was sent a packet and contract to pay a school thousands of dollars to act as their janitor in hopes they would want me to be a teacher there eventually. I went to interviews for teaching positions, only to be told that what they really needed was people to tend to the toileting needs of severely handicapped adults or working on a road crew for minimum wage. I know the evils of job interviews.

I ran Amber through more questions but, even though she is only facing her doting husband, teasing her as much as giving a practice interview, it already feels real to her.

She has had the interview already, I assure her. That was the point of the internship. By this point, she is nearly their employee.

Next day, she collapses onto me as I sit in the living room, sounding not as though she had been crying but as though she could at any moment if I say the wrong thing.

I have already forgotten about her interview, though she has thought about nothing else while she finished out a few of her last internship hours.

They did, in fact, interview her, though they noted that they were already predisposed because she owned and was wearing their uniform. Still, their question were almost impersonal, as though she hadn't spent so much time at their side intubating, injecting, and cleaning up after clients.

"They talked to me like I was an adult," mopes the nearly thirty-year-old woman to whom I have been married for almost four years. The experience of being interviewed sapped her. "I should get ice cream. We should just get into the car and drive to get ice cream."

"Do you want to do that?"

"I don't know, Do you want to?" With her resilience has gone, her ability to state things with authority, even if they are as small as sticking to wanting ice cream, had vanished which I judged reason enough for a preprandial cone.

When we are halfway there, she asks if she should get it chocolate dipped or with sprinkles. The decision is the definition of inconsequential, but she needs me to make it.

"Sprinkles," I say without hesitation.

"Because they are lucky," she adds because why wouldn't they be? Why shouldn't she make up superstition to suit her? She doesn't need luck, not with her skill and dedication, but let her want it from colorful sugar.

The ice cream soothes her enough, at least letting her forget the day preceding, dividing it neatly between The Time Before Ice Cream (When People Asked Me Questions I Did Not Like) and The Time After Ice Cream (When My Husband Made Me Tacos While I Studied).

I've said before that I do not know a more capable person who it less rewarded than Amber. She is far more devoted to learning and growing broadly than I have ever been (I am more the type to grow such encompassing root systems that no water or nourishment can get to me). I am stymied that the professional world has erstwhile neglected this obvious fact, demonstrated by giving Amber almost any task and a few hours in which to research. I understand that first blush, underestimating Amber because of her femininity, stature, and smile. Anyone who spends more than a few minutes with her when she is in her element cannot in good conscience doubt her abilities, though she is often met with people who must not have good consciences.

Of course, this animal hospital will offer her the job because I cannot make sense of a business where they wouldn't, having seen what she can do.

Soon in Xenology: Meaning. Anxiety.

last watched: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
reading: Abduction by John E. Mack
listening: REM