| The call wasn’t. It was not. No existence could be ascribed to the call. At least, at the moment, at Yale University at 2:15PM on Wednesday, February 27, 2008, John’s phone was silent. He was standing alone, waiting. He was waiting alone, standing. Every part of his body twittered with nervous energy. In the past week, in his quest for a summer job, in complete disregard for his academic standing, he had:
• Woken at 7AM on Wednesday for an hour-long group interview in New York followed by an SAT-style multiple-choice quantitative reasoning test that seemed to have been written by fifty monkeys locked in a room for a year with only typewriters and bananas. Stupid test.
• Woken at 5:30AM (hardcore!) on Thursday to fly to Washington DC for five hours of interviews, enduring monkey-written inane ridiculous asinine gratuitous redundant case interview questions before flying back to New York in the evening.
• Woken at 7AM on Friday for four more hours of interviews in New York including an hour-long writing sample on whether smoking should be banned that he answered in five extremely well-structured paragraphs with a broadening though formulaic conclusion, taken a train back to New Haven, lost his luggage, and had a final hour-long phone interview that had in all likelihood not gone well.
It had been a long week, and he doubted his future, his abilities, himself. For now it was time to be hearing back. The call was supposed to arrive any time now. Only it hadn’t. His whole body was fiddling nervously: toes wiggled angrily against the confining leather of Josh’s shoes; abdominal muscles flexed and loosened arhythmically; and hands jabbed at the numerous buttons on his phone, pressing the “accept call” button hopefully.
Any moment now. Any moment now. Any –
| The call wasn’t. It was not. No existence could be ascribed to the call. At least, at the moment, at Yale University at 2:15PM on Wednesday, February 27, 2008, John’s phone was silent. He was standing alone, waiting. He was waiting alone, standing. Every part of his body twittered with nervous energy. In the past week, in his quest for a summer job, in complete disregard for his academic standing, he had:
• Woken at 7AM on Wednesday for an hour-long group interview in New York followed by an SAT-style multiple-choice quantitative reasoning test that seemed to have been written by fifty monkeys locked in a room for a year with only typewriters and bananas. Stupid test.
• Woken at 5:30AM (hardcore!) on Thursday to fly to Washington DC for five hours of interviews, enduring monkey-written inane ridiculous asinine gratuitous redundant case interview questions before flying back to New York in the evening.
• Woken at 7AM on Friday for four more hours of interviews in New York including an hour-long writing sample on whether smoking should be banned that he answered in five extremely well-structured paragraphs with a broadening though formulaic conclusion, taken a train back to New Haven, lost his luggage, and had a final hour-long phone interview that had in all likelihood not gone well.
It had been a long week, and he doubted his future, his abilities, himself. For now it was time to be hearing back. The call was supposed to arrive any time now. Only it hadn’t. His whole body was fiddling nervously: toes wiggled angrily against the confining leather of Josh’s shoes; abdominal muscles flexed and loosened arhythmically; and hands jabbed at the numerous buttons on his phone, pressing the “accept call” button hopefully.
Any moment now. Any moment now. Any –