My Advice to Donald Trump
When I first got out of college with my fabulously useful degree in English, I moved to a Polish farmhouse in northern Wisconsin. My neighbors, assuming I was destitute since the house had no running water and only an outhouse for a bathroom, decided to help me out by setting up an interview at the local school bus company. I didn’t know how to tell them tactfully that I didn’t mind poverty near as much as I minded work, but that seemed like a tricky argument to make and still remain friends.
So I went to the interview. I wore my worst jeans, the one with multiple tears and holes and patches, a rumpled t-shirt with frayed neck, and some shoes that looked like they’d been eaten by rodents all winter. I took my most indolent attitude, my hippie hair and tossed on a ratty hat for good measure. Nobody up in this redneck neck of the woods would hire me, I figured, but at least I could tell my neighbors I went to the bus company and they wouldn’t employ me, god only knows why.
The bus office was basically a shed and it was there I met the manager and his mechanic. We bantered a bit, talked about living in an old farmhouse with a pump over a 40 foot well out in the middle of the yard, joked about the outhouse and the woodchuck that lived in it, told a few stories and basically killed some time between the morning and afternoon bus runs. They seemed like nice fellows and they were greatly amused by me, I could see. Finally I got up to go, my work here done, and Walt, the manager asked when could I start. Start? I said. Start, he answered.
And so I got my first job after college. My advice to Mr. Trump is: be careful. Be very careful. You just never know in this mixed up world who might be willing to overlook your obvious flaws and give you the job you only pretended to want.