(I made sure to wait until I was positive I didn’t get the job before telling this story…)
Last week I went for a job interview in Chabanel, Montreal’s clothes manufacturing district, north of the plateau. The position was copywriting for an online store.
Things started off ok. While waiting for the bus, a pair of guys approached me to take my picture for a streetstyle blog. “Wish me luck!” I said. “You’re a shoe in!” they smiled. But once I got up to Chabanel, I took a wrong turn down Meilleur avenue and ended up getting lost and wandering around the Metropolitan highway for 45 minutes in bad shoes on the hottest day of the year.
I finally found the office, arriving sunburned and covered in sweat, and sat down to wait. I was handed a questionnaire to fill out with some multiple choice questions (What type of pant leg is this? a) wide, b) boot cut….), a writing test (Create a product description for the item pictured), and a bunch of personality indicators, the last of which was: How creatively fucked up are you?
The phrase was printed on the form in the same font as “List your favourite fashion designers.” There were no quotation marks around “fucked up” to indicate irony. It was just fucked and then up. Whoever wrote the questionnaire (the man I was about to meet?) actually wanted me to tell them precisely how creatively fucked up I was.
Now, my mind started reeling. How creatively fucked up was I? At first it read like an insult. This questionnaire had its own ideas about “creative people” that included a certain amount of “fucked-up-ed-ness” inherent to them. But it was a job interview. Obviously they weren’t looking for somebody fucked up. And it was a copywriting job. So they didn’t want anyone who would ever write “fucked up” on a form in somebody’s office.
Had they been burned in the past by some copywriting virtuoso who eventually fell off the deep end? Did they want to hear about my fashion neuroses? Was this supposed to be an example of the wrong kind of creativity?
You can see the position I was in. I knew it was a test; would I try to be the best at everything presumed to be required of me? “Yes. I am completely fucked up. Totally bonkers.” Would I come across as entirely uncreative? “Not at all. I’m really very dull.” And yet how would someone who was truly messed up from all their genius go about answering that question? Probably not with a yes. I pictured the interviewer at his desk with a row of carefully arranged armchair psychology books, thinking, “Man, I’m going to throw a real curveball here. Really going to get at the heart of the matter. See how they handle this one.” It infuriated me in its stupidity.
I mulled it over for a few minutes—intermittently dabbing my broiling forehead with a tissue—and eventually wrote something cute using a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a piece of styrofoam and 10 being Picasso, placing myself somewhere around a 5. I have no idea how that went over with my interviewer, although his first question when I finally went in was how had I found the questionnaire. “On a scale of 1 to 10?…”
I think the interview went ok, but I wasn’t prepared enough to talk/lie effectively about my plans for the future (this is also a trope in my real life) and I think he was scared by my age, thinking I would run off if something better came along.
After the interview, I had to take the 55 bus straight down to the venue where I was playing that night for soundcheck and immediately posed the question to my bandmates, “Hey guys, how creatively fucked up are you?” We laughed about it for a while and then we went on stage and played our set and sat around afterwards until everything was done and we could pack up our gear and go home to bed. I was exhausted when I finally got to sleep with that ridiculous phrase still floating around in my head.
A week later, I still haven’t cracked it. So, tell me, how creatively fucked up are you?
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cvxn answered:
Obsequious as it sounds, I’d probably have gone with “As fucked up as you need me to be”
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