Job Interviews from the Dark Side, Part 8

For most of these "Interviews from the Dark Side" that I've related in this series, the focus has been on women's negative job interviews--but they happen to men, too. Back in the eighties I had a male friend who worked as a radio announcer (disc jockey), and he sent his resume to a station, that was advertising a job opening, in a distant part of the state. That station wasn't in a big market, but it was in a little bigger market than the stations on his resume. 

The station manager called my friend, said he received the resume and was very impressed and wanted to talk to him right away. So my friend bought a bus ticket and took a bus across half the state, to what he believed to be a discussion about being hired for a job--one that was advertised.

I asked him the next day what happened. "That guy dragged me all the way up there to tell me I'm no good!" he vented.

He told me how he walked into the guy's office, and the guy had my friend's resume on his desk, and the guy launched into a spiel about, "Pay your dues and get some experience. Come back after you pay your dues and get some experience. I'm very impressed with your fine resume, but first you have to pay your dues and get some experience. I'll be looking forward to talking to you again, but first you have to pay your dues and get some experience." 

My friend was probably tempted to rub the guy's nose in every line of his resume. Anybody who actually bothered to read it could tell that the job applicant already had years of "paying" his "dues" and getting "some" experience, at small-time station job after small-time station job. If the station manager had been serious about hiring my friend, the job would have represented something a little more than small-time, a little more stable, a little bit bigger market, and if the guy didn't want to hire him, then he didn't have to schedule an appointment for an interview.

I've long wondered what the station manager was thinking, first calling my friend about how he was very impressed with his fine resume and he wanted to set up an appointment right away, only to turn around and just about literally show him the door when he arrived for said appointment.

Did the station manager mix my friend up with someone else? Did he think the person who sent the resume and the person who walked into his office were two different people, and the person who walked in was some never-had-any-job teenager who needed to hear some grown-up give the pay-your-dues-and-get-some-experience lecture? That's unlikely because the station manager could have simply verified the name and experience of the person sitting in front of him.

Was the station manager a sexual predator who called up young men to look them over, and if he found them not to his taste, he showed them the door? That, too, is unlikely because such men quickly develop reputations--word gets around--and this man, the word wasn't getting around about.

I can only think of one other possibility--that the station manager was a living example of "a legend in his own mind," thinking that because he was the manager of some jerkwater radio station, that he was running his own little media empire, where he could "encourage" job applicants to "come back" and they'd be forever grateful for having been invited into his presence to hear his mansplaining lecture about paying dues and getting experience. 

No, Sir, that's not what was happening. I don't know how many people you toyed with the way you toyed with my friend, but I doubt that any of them looked forward to ever coming back into your "legendary" presence ever again.