The Kind of Girl Who … tells you to shove it

by That Kind of Girl on November 23, 2009

NTKOG #65: The kind of girl who, when she has been mistreated by someone in a position of authority, instead of just taking it with a smile, gives the jerkwad whatfor instead.

I am: laid-back, would be a nice way of putting it. A doormat, though, might be more accurate.

I am not: good with: confrontation, authority, or recognizing when people have definitely stepped over a line with me.

The Scene: Job interview in Brookline last week, for a secretarial position at a firm that deals in a field completely outside my range of interests. The interview has been set up by a temp agency, though, so I put on my power suit, brush up on my interview questions, and walk in fifteen minutes early with resume in hand and a big ol’ smile on my face.

Half an hour later, the guy who’s supposed to interview me finally moseys into the office and immediately I can tell he is — well, “a sleazy fucking jerkwad” is really too delicate a phrase, I think. He’s in his mid-50s; very GQ; too much cologne.When he takes my hand, there is no pretense of a shake. Instead, he squeezes hard enough to pulp the bones down to marrow, then takes a seat across from me.

“So, you’re from Prestigious West Coast University, eh?” he says, and I smile and nod. “And you’re looking for a secretarial position. Ha!” He looks like a guy who has too often and too wistfully watched Mad Men, wishing for the good old days when he could have conducted this interview while sipping from a tumbler full of Scotch.

While we are talking, he leans back in his leather exec chair and crosses his arms behind his head. One of his legs is crossed, his foot resting against the table. He looks like he’s waiting for a girl to crawl under the table and just start blowing him right there.

Did I mention he’s a huge fucking asshole?

The whole interview, he lets me say approximately twenty words. The rest of the time he goes on about how important he is and what high-level work he does. He mentions, charitably, that “the girls” are necessary to help run the office. He asks whether I feel up to the challenge of cleaning up the office at the end of the day.

The whole time, also, he keeps throwing out acidic little barbs about the university I went to, and the fact that I left there without a job, then smugging that he bets I don’t like it when he makes these little jokes. Uh, no shit? The school I went to was, like, pretty okay, and not infrequently, insecure people like to play a nasty little head game about it: they’ll make constant negative comments about various stereotypes about the school — not least of all the stereotype that grads are arrogant — then when I finally tell them to, dude, seriously, stop it, they smile back: “See what I mean? You guys are so arrogant.” I — I cannot tell you how much this infuriates me. I love the school I went to; I had four wonderful years there, met all my best friends there, and generally have positive feelings about it. And I’d expect everybody to feel the same way about their own undergraduate institutions, so why are we even talking about this?

And yet, he talked about it. For at least ten minutes of the forty-minute interview. After he’d finished his monologue of Important Manly Poweritude, he asked me: “So, you have any questions for me, honey?” Um, yeah, just one. How does the fine Commonwealth of Massachusetts feel about vigilante castration?

Sadly, though, although I prepared a totally appropriate feminist rant — or at least a withering barb — the asshole hurried me out of the interview room before I could find my voice. So. Fail on that front. But. BUT! I did call the temp agency and withdraw myself from the interview process, citing, in only slightly more polite language, irreconcilably assholic behavior as the reason for my request.

The Verdict: I’m pretty bummed out that my knee-jerk authority cowering was too strong for me to overcome right to this jerkwad’s (jerk)face, but I’m going to go ahead and give myself partial points for actually withdrawing from the interview process instead of continuing to jump through his asshole hoops. The more of the (sometimes terrible) real world I see, the more I realize that there are lots of guys like this out there, who feel the constant urge to make it known: “Hey, little lady, fuck your fancy education and your power suit and all your big clever ideas. At the end of the day, this is still a man’s world and, heads up, I take my coffee with two sugars, sugar.”

Aaaaaaargh. Even thinking about this makes me hate men. So even though I wimped out this time, next time I meet a guy who is Part Of The Problem, dude, he best be prepared for an unholy rant.