We Have Met The Enemy...

...And He Is Ants!

(Original title: We Have Met The Enemy...And He Has Extremely Plausible Deniability!)

So you're sitting across the table from a guy and talking about a job. You aren't talking about getting the job, but not getting the job is most assuredly on the table. The job isn't exactly challenging, respectable, interesting, or remunerative, but it's a job. It stands shining before you both, clad in shimmering respectability, brilliant most of all in its contrast with that other figure standing before you, Unemployment. This is a drab and sullen shape, not even definably human, with lumpy, unscheduled features, unstructured bones and a hungry, helpless look that makes you clutch at your billfold.

The guy across the table doesn't glance at these figures and neither do you. It's obviously bad luck.

So it's also obvious he sympathizes with you. You'll do. The conversation becomes less goal-directed and you put a question to him about working there. It's great, nice bosses, plenty of upward mobility. You decide leave the guy with his apparently favorable impression of you and ask the rote HR questions of the HR person you've been dealing with, so you thank him for an enjoyable interview.

When the HR person gets to you, she seems distracted, distant, as though worried about something else but hiding it, well as able. You learn a few things and confirm a few things, and she tells you there's no training for at least a couple of weeks, so wait for a phone call and if you're still interested, they'll train.

Perfunctory, desultory, not what you would call laudatory. Your week hasn't precisely been champagne and caviar, and you may be getting the brush off from the local Taco Bell of your profession.

Hm. Yeah, now you REALLY want to come work there. Maybe someday you'll get back to making what you did in my last job, which was, ah, low. Not that you're complaining. You? Never!

You're just concerned that your resume, which suggested that you're overqualified for the job, and your relatively strong interest in getting promoted quickly, cast you as an uninteresting go-getter without soul or indeed any valuable talent other than "job seeker skills." Did this fleeting impression waft in attached to your person like a trail of toilet tissue with the end tucked to your trousers? Whoops, professional foul.

Nope, that didn't happen. So why did you seem to become Somebody Else's Problem during the second conversation?

(A well-dressed couple walking along the road)

MAN: Oh, look honey - it's a person enraged at himself for not being successful at selling out.
WOMAN: Oh dear. Thank goodness I'm not having HIS children.

Then someone else representing another Otherwise Promising Possibility calls back in answer to your three voice mails (she seems to have been on vacation for two of them) and lets you know that if you don't hear something by Wednesday, you won't hear anything.

Ah, yes - here are those hard times again. The ones you have to get through, remembering that you don't have any life insurance to speak of and driving into a bridge abutment wouldn't clarify the murky future that much. Sure, yes, it would address those lying-awake nights, the physical discomfort associated with letting your mind skip barefoot through the field of jagged glass that was your day. But lemme get a little medieval Buddhist/Princess Bride on you, Princess: "Life is pain, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is selling something."

Look on the bright side. Maybe it feels like there's ants crawling on your skin because there's ants crawling on your skin. And on the counter and the cupboards and the floor by the trash can. It's spring and that's what ants do; you're not gonna stop 'em. Environmentally speaking, it's hardly even smart to try.

Oh, you want to persuade 'em to go somewhere else by straightening this place up a bit?

That's worth a go; there might even be a whiff of plausible deniability in it for you afterward.
And your eyes are on your work. You're not even glancing up at those two figures on the road there.

They might even go away for a while.