The Suit

 Working at the House of Chin I thought I had it made.  The hours were convenient, I got a meal of good Chinese food with every shift.  I could drink on the job and off the job my fellow bartenders would only charge me for a beer if the owner was in the bar.  Tending bar was not that much different from just hanging with my friends.  People would ask are you going to do this the rest of  your life, and I would say sure why not?

But then one day I looked in the mirror and the answer was, no, I don't want to.  I went to the local junior college and got a junior degree in data processing because everybody was hiring computer programmers.  A few days after I graduated I wrote my first resume (what was with that?) and bought a suit.  I went out to a fancy store and there was some salesman helping me out and I came out of the store wearing this.

Pretty swift hey?  I thought so.  But none of those bosses I had heard would grab up programmers like banana bunches thought so despite my snappy resume and way cool three piece suit.

My younger sister lived in San Francisco and I thought sure they would snap me up there and I spent a week there going to offices and handing out that snappy resume to bored teenage girls who were courteous enough to wait for me to leave the room before they tossed it into the wastebasket and went home defeated.

But wait a week after I got back, a phone call came from a headhunter, evil, evil, Tamara Baum.  She had just the job that was the perfect fit for me and she knew they would hire me and, and all I had to do was get over to their office in that cool blue three piece suit and I would have that job as quick as a cat can wink her eye.

I had spent half my savings to make that first trip and now I spent the other half to go out to the golden state again.  I remember, I remember, walking those fancy downtown San Francisco sidewalks surrounded by people who were wearing suits just like me.  Was I like one of them?  Could they tell that I was just a beer guzzling ex hippie, just a sow's ear trying to pass for a silk purse?

I girded my loins, so to speak and walked into some glassy skyscraper and was walking out again in about half an hour.  The job was nothing like evil Tamara Baum had said it would be, and they had never had any intention of hiring me.  

Buncha jagoffs.