civil service interviews

I had a brief stint at the post office.  Before I took the actual test I studied in a book of practice tests.  It was just a certain way of thinking and the longer I took the practice tests the better I got at it, so I did pretty good on the test.  When I went in for the interview, the guy looked kind of bored and he asked me if I could lift a forty pound bag of mail.  I said I supposed so, and he said I was hired.

Years later I took an IRS exam in Texas and did well enough to be called in for an interview.  Well I knew about those civil service interviews, if you passed the test you got the job.  So when they asked me if i had ever been arrested I told them about my arrests including the one in Berkeley for assault with a deadly weapon.  What? they asked, and I went on about how you know, it was the sixties, and you know and they were all What? again.  And in the end they didn't hire me.  I guess all civil service interviews are the same.

Years later I was being interviewed for juror duty, and I told about the Berkeley arrest, thinking maybe it would get me off duty, but it didn't.  It was about a guy at the Nabisco bakery who slipped moving some equipment and broke his knee on the greasy floor.  The Nabisco lawyer said, well the guy should have refused to move the equipment but I thought hell, if the boss tells you to do something you have to do it.  Made a short speech to that effect in the jury room, and I don't know if it had any effect, but the jury voted for the guy.  A few months later I ran across the guy's lawyer on the street, and he said when he heard about that Berkeley arrest he knew I was a bleeding heart liberal and didn't try to kick me off the jury.

Hum, bleeding heart liberal.  There's a discussion, but we will skip that this freezing morning because neither dawg seems interested in liberals.


Gorillas have a pretty big vocabulary, but not what we call a language.  But they do know how to lie.  Sometimes one of the gorillas makes the warning noise for predators and all the gorillas run away and he eats the breadfruit they have stored up, but generally they only let him get away with that once or twice.  I suppose the cry of alarm became the word for lion and so on.  But vocabulary is not enough, you have to have syntax.  Those chimps that pushed the computer buttons had a large vocabulary and they could express themselves pretty well as to what they wanted, but they never developed sufficient syntax to be called a language.  They didn't have that hard-wired stuff like we humans do.